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 . ||||| Credit card agreements still mostly unreadable 
 
 Months after card agreements were publicly posted, a few show improvements 
 
 By Connie Prater 
 
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 If you've had a hard time reading your credit card agreement in the past, it probably isn't any easier to plow through the fine print now. 
 
 A CreditCards.com analysis of how difficult or easy it is for the average American to read and understand a credit card agreement shows some of the worst contracts have improved somewhat in the past few months but are still too complex for the average consumer. 
 
 READABILITY FOLLOW-UP In a follow-up to its July 2010 credit card agreement readability study, CreditCards.com looked at the 20 most difficult to read and the 20 wordiest contracts to see if any had improved between July and October. Only six of the 20 most difficult-to-read contracts showed improvement. Nine of the 20 had the same reading level, three were more difficult to read and two were no longer offered by the credit card issuer. All were still rated at the 12th grade reading level or higher -- too difficult for four out of five adults to understand. 
 
 That's the key finding of a CreditCards.com follow-up to our July 2010 analysis of the readability of all major U.S. credit card agreements . For this follow-up, we looked again at the worst offenders -- the ones we had identified in July as most difficult to read and the wordiest contracts. The goal: to see if the most recent of the contracts submitted to the Federal Reserve each quarter were any more readable than the first batch. (See methodology .) 
 
 Under the Credit CARD Act of 2009, major credit card issuers in the United States are required to submit copies of their credit card agreements to the Fed, which must post them to the Web. 
 
 The July analysis found that the initial contracts submitted to the Fed required a 12th grade reading level on average to understand. The average American adult in the United States reads at only the ninth grade level. 
 
 Although consumer credit counselors advise cardholders to be sure to read and know the terms of their credit cards, four out of five adults don't read well enough to understand the average credit card agreement. 
 
 In the follow-up analysis, many of the worst agreements showed improvement -- meaning new contracts submitted to the Fed and analyzed with the same readability software programs were slightly better than earlier versions of the contracts. However, all were still tough reading for average adults. 
 
 "The reason these agreements are typically complex is that they have lots of hidden fees and traps," says Josh Frank, a senior researcher for the Center for Responsible Lending, a North Carolina-based consumer group. "What's in the complexity can cause the consumer problems ... can do them financial harm." 
 
 Safer credit cards 
 
 The National Consumer Law Center identified simple terms and clear disclosure as one of the top 11 features of a "safer credit card" in a report issued Nov. 18, 2010. "The terms must be simple enough and disclosed clearly enough that they are likely to be noticed and understood by the vast majority of cardholders," according to the report. 
 
 Consumer groups are hoping that the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- currently being organized by former Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren in the U.S. Treasury Department -- will make clarity and simple credit card terms one of its first tasks. However, the agency won't likely be up and fully functioning until late 2011. So, consumers shouldn't expect to be able to speed read through their credit card agreements any time soon. 
 
 The reason these agreements are typically complex is that they have lots of hidden fees and traps. -- Josh Frank 
 
 Center for Responsible Lending 
 
 "Elizabeth Warren is putting a focus on complexity in card agreements," Frank said. "I expect that there will be some change there, but it's hard to say how soon. I would expect it in the long term." 
 
 Frank conducted a different kind of analysis of credit card terms, but came to the same conclusion about complexity. "Numbers Game," published in October 2010, analyzed the total number of numeric figures contained in typical credit card offers as a measure of the complexity of the deals. They found that between 1999 and 2009, the complexity of terms offered in the Schumer Box -- a table that summarizes terms of the credit card offer -- rose by 250 percent. However, the complexity began to decline in 2010 after the bulk of the CARD Act reform provisions took effect. 
 
 Frank said the days of hidden fees and terms aren't likely over. "In the long term, I think there will be other tricks to look for," he said. 
 
 Language doesn't matter? 
 
 Nick Bourke, director of the Pew Safe Credit Cards Project, which is conducting ongoing research and monitoring card industry practices, acknowledged that the new credit card reform law has benefited consumers by preventing credit card issuers from hiking interest rates "at any time for any reason." 
 
 "Even if the language is still complicated, what's behind the language is a little bit more straightforward," he said. If agreements are written in simple language, that doesn't guarantee that the terms are fair, Bourke said. "If they say, 'We will credit your incoming payments in a way that is suitable to the banks,' those are pretty simple words." Previously, banks and credit unions would put monthly payments toward balances with the lowest interest first. This meant consumers paid more in interest on balances with higher rates. That practice, known as payment allocation, is now banned by the CARD Act. Credit card issuers must now apply any amounts in excess of the minimum monthly payment to balances with the highest interest rates first. 
 
 Bourke said the language in the credit card agreement "has become a little less important because the products themselves are a little safer. A lot of that old language was masking practices that were difficult to understand and harmful." 
 
 Worst contracts haven't gotten much better 
 
 CreditCards.com reviewed the 20 most difficult reads and 20 wordiest contracts from July and compared them with contracts for the same cards published by the Fed in the third quarter of 2010. Six of the 20 most difficult-to-read contracts showed improvement; nine of the 20 were rated the same readability level as previous versions -- often because they were the same contract. Only three contracts were worse. Two of the 20 agreements were no longer listed in the Fed's database, an indication that the credit cards were no longer offered by the issuer. 
 
 A GTE Federal Credit Union agreement topped the list of the most difficult to read contracts in July. That agreement required 18.5 years of education to understand. The lender swapped that agreement out for another contract that was rated 16.2 years -- a 12 percent improvement, but still very high. 
 
 A Compass Bank agreement that ranked fourth on the list of unreadable contracts got a makeover. According to Ed Bilek, senior vice president and director of external communications for BBVA Compass Bank, which owns Compass, it was no accident that the same contract given a 17.5 reading level in the first analysis scored only 12.7 in the follow-up review. 
 
 "It was deliberate," Bilek said, adding the company began re-tooling its contracts in 2009 after passage of the CARD Act. He acknowledged that the 12.7 grade level rating is "still too high" and said the bank is continuing its efforts to simplify terms for its customers. The re-writing that began in 2009 continued in 2010 with further tweaking of language. 
 
 "Part of that was redoing our disclosure in our credit card agreement with the idea in mind that we tried to make it much easier to read and understand," Bilek said. "The two traits that we believe should be in every product are transparency and simplicity." 
 
 He added: "We talk to our customers quite a bit about our products. We ask them, 'You read it. Did you understand it? Is it easy?'" 
 
 More brevity 
 
 There was clear evidence of editing for brevity on several of the wordiest contracts. Among the 20 wordiest agreements from July, three out of four (15 contracts) had been shortened, according to the readability software program. 
 
 The average agreement analyzed in July ran 3,771 words. A contract for Fifth Third Bank topped the list of wordiest among the more than 1,200 agreements reviewed in July. The program determined that contract had 20,799 words spread over 19 pages. The updated agreement was more spartan, however. It contained only 14,406 words in 15 pages. Both old and new agreements required 15 years reading level. Note: Because the software program deletes words that are contained in headlines, bulleted lists and subtitles, the actual number of words in the agreement are higher. 
 
 For comparison, the original U.S. Constitution contains only 4,018 words. William Shakespeare's shortest play, "The Comedy of Errors," has 17,858 words. 
 
 ... We tried to make it easier to read and understand. -- Ed Bilek 
 
 BBVA Compass Bank spokesman 
 
 A GE Money Bank retail credit card for Dick's Sporting Goods stores got a major rewrite. It dropped from 11,000 to about 2,000 words -- and from a college reading level (15 years) to a ninth grade reading level, according to the analysis. Similarly, a BrandsMart department store retail card, also issued by GE Money Bank, underwent a dramatic improvement between the first and second analysis. Previously, the agreement contained more than 11,000 words and required 15 years of education to read. The new version contained 1,900 words written at the ninth grade reading level. 
 
 Banking industry representatives say contracts are written the way they are because federal and state banking laws require them to make certain disclosures about the cards. They deny that the agreements are deliberately written to confuse consumers. 
 
 Some banks and credit unions, however, do manage to satisfy legal requirements without dense language. In our July analysis, we identified the 10 easiest-to-read contracts. All were from credit unions. They were written at less than a seventh grade level. 
 
 Experts say most credit card holders don't bother reading their entire contracts. It's no wonder -- the documents are tough reading even for consumer attorneys and people with advanced degrees. Frank, the responsible-lending group researcher, who has a doctorate degree, said he struggles through some passages in the documents: "I have to focus to really understand it." 
 
 Lenders are required to send the agreements when new credit card accounts are opened or if a consumer requests a copy of their contract. See how to get your credit card agreement . 
 
 Frank said the issue is whether the densely worded fine print in the credit card agreement is fair to consumers. 
 
 "It's supposed to be an agreement between two parties," he said. "If it's too complex for one party to ever read or understand, then is it really an agreement as opposed to something that's imposed on you?" 
 
 The methodology: How we did it 
 
 CreditCards.com copied the list of more than 1,200 credit card agreements posted on the Federal Reserve Board's website. Under the Credit CARD Act of 2009, all U.S. credit card issuers with more than 10,000 credit card accounts must submit their agreements to the Fed every quarter as well as post them on their own company websites and make them available to account holders who request them. The Fed launched the site on May 24, 2010, with the initial list of credit card contracts. The site was updated in October 2010. New contracts were added and some deleted from the list, while others remained unchanged. Every credit card agreement posted on the Fed's website as of May 24, 2010, was evaluated by two readability programs that were purchased from Micro Power & Light Co., a Dallas software development company. The first program prepped the content by deleting special characters, incomplete sentences, tables and any special coding that may have been in the text versions of the files. The second program scored the text using three different well-established readability formulas: the Flesch reading ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade level and FOG (Frequency of Gobbledygook) indexes. Only one of the formulas, the widely used FOG score, was used in determining the best and worst credit card agreements and average reading level of a U.S. credit card agreement. We removed Spanish contracts that were included in the Fed's database. In some instances, credit card issuers included both Spanish and English text in their contracts. We deleted any Spanish text and ran the readability formulas on the remaining English content. Some files posted on the Fed's website were not credit card agreements but rather supplemental materials that often accompany agreements, such as tables listing interest and penalty rates and fees or information about credit card or disability insurance. In some instances, they were credit card applications. Those files were not scored for readability. A small number of contracts were not evaluated for readability because the text versions of the agreements were either empty or did not reflect what was actually in the agreement. Because the computer program that prepped the contracts removed headlines, incomplete sentences and special characters, it also removed words from credit card agreements. Therefore, the total word count reflected in the results is less than the word count derived by putting the contracts into a word processing program. In the second analysis, conducted in October and November 2010, we looked at the worst contracts (the 20 most difficult to read and the 20 wordiest) from the original filings and compared them to agreements for the same card products posted in the second batch of filings to the Fed's website. 
 
 See related: U.S. credit card agreements unreadable to 4 out of 5 adults, A guide to the Credit CARD Act of 2009 
 
 Published: November 23, 2010 
 
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 ||||| Felix Salmon 
 
 Blaine Harden’s astonishing account of the life of Shin In Geun — a man born into a North Korean prison camp, who has lived pretty much the worst life imaginable — has received significantly less attention than the fact that This American Life has retracted its story about working conditions at Foxconn, which was based on Mike Daisey’s monologue. (If you don’t want to listen to the hour-long retraction, which is a masterpiece of the form, the transcript is available here.) 
 
 Daisey has attempted to defend his actions, using an end-justifies-the-means argument: 
 
 What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China. 
 
 Kevin Slavin has defended Daisey, too: 
 
 His skill in telling the story he told is responsible for the phenomenal amount of media around Chinese factory labor practices. Not the New York Times’ China bureau. Not Bloomberg Businessweek. Show me some reporters who were able to generate the same cultural engagement with the issue, will you? Stories aren’t made out of facts. Storytellers use facts to reveal truth but they use a lot of other things too. And if ever I have to choose between facts and truth, I’ll take truth. It’s always a great story, and stories are the life inside the human mind. 
 
 It’s a lot easier to tell a great story if you don’t also need to be factual about things. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are fiction; Richard III and Henry V are mostly fiction, albeit based on historical events. And it’s precisely because they’re fictional — because Shakespeare was always storyteller first and foremost — that they’re still performed so regularly, all over the world, and that they have had such powerful emotional resonance with billions of people over the centuries since they were written. 
 
 But here’s the thing: Shakespeare never lied. He never sat down in front of thousands of people to tell a first-person story, over and over again, about events which he had simply invented. He never ended that story with an exhortation which would carry no weight if his audience thought the story was fiction: 
 
 When Apple would call journalists who had spoken to me, and tell them, “You know, I don’t know if you want to be associated with him. He’s kind of unstable. You know, he does work in the theater.” I would keep my head down. And I would tell my story. And tonight—we know the truth. 
 
 At the end of Daisey’s show, every member of the audience is given a sheet of paper with the heading “CHANGE IS POSSIBLE”. It includes Tim Cook’s email address, and urges the audience to, among other things, “think different about upgrading”. And one of the reasons why Daisey’s show has proved so popular — his This American Life episode was the most downloaded in the show’s history, even more than the squirrel cop — is that it combined great storytelling with a feeling that this is happening now and we should do something about it. It’s exactly the same formula used by Kony 2012, a project which is equally problematic. 
 
 My friend and Reuters colleague Rebecca Hamilton has written a great book, Fighting for Darfur, which should be required reading for anybody who has been drawn in by the Kony 2012 campaign. Or, for that matter, by Daisey’s monologue. Here’s what she wrote to me: 
 
 To build a mass movement quickly, it helps to have an over-simplified, emotive narrative with a single demand. It also helps to tells people that by doing easy tasks – sharing a link on Facebook, buying a bracelet — they can save lives. Central to the formula is that the agency of local actors gets downplayed to hype up the importance of action by outsiders. But all those ingredients inevitably lead to eventual failure when the simple solutions can’t fix the complex reality. The movement walks away, disillusioned. And in the meantime untold resources have been expended on solutions that have been out of step with what local activists need. 
 
 The fact is that the chief beneficiary of the success of Daisey’s monologue has been Mike Daisey, much more than any group of factory workers or underground trades unionists in China. Similarly, the chief beneficiary of the success of Kony 2012 has been Invisible Children, a US non-profit which spends its money mostly on making movies. 
 
 And this is where the justifications coming from Daisey and Slavin really fall down — in the idea that if you get a lot of westerners riled up about what’s going on in some far-flung part of the world, then that is in and of itself a Good Thing. Daisey has managed to convince himself that his interests are perfectly aligned with those of the workers at Foxconn. Even when he presents himself as some kind of savior in a Hawaiian shirt, bringing wisdom to the workers just by asking the right questions: 
 
 I’m just ad-hoc-ing questions, I’m asking the questions you would expect: “What village in China are you from? How long have you been working at Foxconn? What do you do at the plant? How do you find your job? What would you change at Foxconn if you could change anything?” That last question always gets them. They always react like a bee has flown into their faces and then they say something to Cathy and Cathy says, “He says he never thought of that before.” Every time. Every time. 
 
 Of course it’s ludicrous to believe that someone working 12-hour shifts at a Foxconn plant wouldn’t start thinking about how the plant might be better run. But that’s the power of theater: its conventions are designed to encourage us to suspend such disbelief. And so we walk away thinking that Mike Daisey is bold and wonderful, and really did ask that question of Foxconn workers under the glare of gun-toting Chinese guards. (Of course, we now know that no Foxconn guards are armed: that bit, too, was made up.) And we think that the Chinese workers are so beaten-down and resigned to their miserable fate that they never even stop to think about how things might be improved. 
 
 And this is why I believe the story of Shin In Geun, despite the fact that its format is inherently treacherous. Both Shin and Harden have every incentive to exaggerate and to make things seem worse than they are; what’s more, there’s absolutely no way of fact-checking the vast majority of what’s in the story. But what’s missing from their tale is the white man’s burden: the idea that a white American like Mike Daisey or Jason Russell (or Jeff Sachs, for that matter) is a selfless hero, doing good for the poor and exploited in other continents. 
 
 What Daisey should have done is what Dave Eggers did when he wrote What is the What: make no pretense that everything is true, and trust in the power of his storytelling to carry the audience along. Instead, he lied — both to This American Life and to his audience. 
 
 I am telling you that I do not speak Mandarin, I do not speak Cantonese, I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture—I don’t know fuck-all about Chinese culture. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old, I met workers who were thirteen years old, I met workers who were twelve. Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? 
 
 This had a lot of resonance for me, when I first heard it, not least because I understand statistics. In order to meet underage workers who are happy to talk about how old they are within two hours of turning up at a factory gate, there need to be a lot of those workers. Many more than the official numbers suggest. But in fact Daisey did not meet underage workers outside the factory gates. (He still claims that he did, but his translator, who’s a much more reliable source, says that he didn’t. And as Evan Osnos says, that whole episode defies credulity in the first place.) 
 
 Daisey’s m.o., it’s now clear, was to go to China, talk to some people, and then write a monologue in which he felt free to incorporate anything he’d read about the plight of workers anywhere in the country, presented as a direct piece of first-person reportage. And there’s a good reason why that’s an underhanded and unethical thing to do, which is that even if Apple did everything Daisey’s asking of them, he could still go to China and return with the exact same monologue. With hindsight, Apple was absolutely right not to engage with Daisey directly, because he created a game they could never win. The only winning move, for them, was not to play. 
 
 Jack Shafer, then, is right to come down hard on Daisey. He concludes with this, about fabulists generally: 
 
 I have my theory: 1) They lie because they don’t have the time or talent to tell the truth, 2) they lie because think they can get away with it, and 3) they lie because they have no respect for the audience they claim to want to enlighten. That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance. 
 
 The irony is that this subject has already been explored in a one-man theatrical performance — one by Mike Daisey, no less. Daisey, you won’t be surprised to hear, is gentler on James Frey and JT Leroy than Shafer is on Daisey, blaming in significant part “the demands of personal storytelling” for their sins. 
 
 In any case, it’s clear that theatrical events are bad places to look for unvarnished truth. And in the set of “theatrical events” I absolutely include things like TED talks. Many people have asked, of the hilarious TED 2012 autotune remix, whether it’s parody or not. The answer is that it’s not parody at all. Rather, it’s the work of someone who has been entranced by TED’s theater, and who hasn’t yet woken up to realize that statements like “we can change the world if we defy the impossible” are less stirring than they are just plain stupid. 
 
 Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be. I’ll be very interested to read Harden’s book about Shin In Geun, to see how the guards and teachers in the prison camp are portrayed — to see whether they’re monsters or whether they themselves are victims of the North Korean regime. As we know from Primo Levi, prison camps will twist and subvert the ethics of all concerned. And even in this excerpt we can see real moral problems: Shin himself behaves with astonishing heartlessness towards his own parents and brother. 
 
 One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is. Daisey stepped way too far over the line when he started outright lying to his audience and to the producers of This American Life. But all of us in the narrative-nonfiction business (I’ve written such stuff myself) are faced at some point with a choice between telling the story and telling the whole truth, or the whole truth as best we understand it. Someone like Michael Lewis will concentrate with a laser focus on the story: what he writes is the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth. And when you have a storyteller like Mike Daisey who considers himself a monologist rather than a journalist, even outright lies can find their way in to the story very easily. 
 
 Ira Glass says that This American Life should have scrapped the idea of doing a Mike Daisey show the minute he told their fact-checkers that he had no way of contacting his translator. But maybe the mistake was made even earlier, when This American Life decided that a theatrical monologue could ever be held to standards of journalistic accuracy. This one certainly couldn’t, and in that I think it’s more the rule than the exception.
– Read any good credit card agreements lately? Didn't think so. A follow-up to a July report on the readability of those contracts finds some improvement, but they're still mostly indecipherable and, in fact, beyond the reading comprehension of the average American, reports CreditCards.com. Consumers groups hope the new protection agency being set up by Elizabeth Warren will help, but that's probably at least a year away. At Reuters, Felix Salmon thinks "somewhere in 2012" is a good guess on when we might see real progress "if we're lucky." He cites one egregious 15-page contract from Fifth Third. "I doubt one cardholder in a hundred could even begin to say what it means to 'honor claims of privilege recognized at law,'" he writes. "I certainly couldn’t." But he also singles out this example from the University of Illinois employee credit union: It's only two pages and free of "gratuitous legalese."