It’s a funny thing, really. On the one hand, as I wrote last week, journalists have a bad habit of taking cover behind the shield of so-called objectivity on difficult or controversial subjects, giving roughly proportionate weight to both sides of arguments in which such a distribution isn’t warranted. But, ironically, that instinct seems to fall conspicuously silent when it comes to the coverage of real estate, an issue that practically begs for balanced coverage.

The coverage of real-estate in this country is as hysterically one-sided as the political coverage in a quasi-democratic state like, say, Tunisia. Real-estate oriented information is almost invariably filtered through a professional organization or association with a vested interest in a particular outcome, but their assertions are almost never contextualized, much less challenged, by the journalists who report on it. Most Canadians would be outraged if the Globe and Mail or the CBC treated a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office as an indisputable fact, and yet those same organizations do that on an almost daily basis when it comes to the spit-polished pressers coming from Re/Max, Royal LePage, or the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA).

Part of the problem is that there’s no official opposition, so to speak. There are no organizations releasing glossy documents about why the latest sales figures portend trouble for the housing market, or making their experts available to speak on camera about why real estate isn’t the best investment a person can make. In the absence of some formal representation on behalf of real-estate’s null hypothesis, journalists are willing to take the word of those who argue so vociferously for its rejection.

The most common manifestation of this form of intellectual laziness is the willingness to treat press releases like uncontestable fact. Take a recent Royal LePage report that predicted a “stronger-than-expected” year that will “likely see home prices steadily rise.” The report predicted that average home prices would rise 3 per cent in 2011 to $348,600. This information was parroted without qualification or condition in most major newspapers, along with the familiar narrative – one created by companies like Royal LePage – that Canada has avoided the real-estate meltdown that hammered the American middle class because of our “stable banking industry, historically low interest rates and improving consumer confidence.”

But Garth Turner, a former MP and perhaps Canada’s most outspoken real-estate refusenik, points out that all of this supposed information was drawn from Royal LePage’s own agents. “Royal LePage commissioned no research company to collect data. No potential buyers or sellers were interviewed. No public sampling was done. No economists were polled to gather a consensus view. There was, simply put, no market data. Instead the sole source for this ‘report’ was an internal survey of the company’s own sales force. That’s right. Real estate agents – who bravely live or die by commission – were asked if they thought prices would rise or fall. And guess what?”

From a professional standpoint, building a story around a highly subjective industry report without either seeking out supporting data or soliciting alternative view points is bad enough. But what the Canadian Press’s Julian Beltrame did last week might be even worse. In a story that reports on news that the Canadian market recorded the lowest number of housing starts all year in December, Beltrame frames the news in the most industry-friendly way conceivable. No, the decline didn’t reflect a decline in the demand for housing, nor did it portend further weakness during the year ahead. Instead, it was a sign that the Canadian market had avoided a crash, and would instead manage a “soft landing” in the year ahead. Beltrame quoted the appropriate authorities, from CMHC chief economist Bob Dugan, who said that “I don’t see a reasonable scenario where the housing market would crash,” to Bank of Montreal economist Robert Kavcic, who confirmed that fears of a real-estate bubble were “pretty out the window now.”

It’s not clear that there is a real-estate crash to come for Canadians, although the fact that we continue to pile up consumer debt – most of which comes in the form of mortgages – in a low-interest environment that is certain to change (if rates doubled from their current levels they’d still be well below the historical norm) should give even the most optimistic onlooker some cause for concern. But the fact that Beltrame is so willing to dismiss it as a possibility amounts to the practice of reckless journalism. The combination of once-in-a-generation house prices (according to the numbers in a recent BC real estate association report, families there are spending 7.3 times their income on their homes; the American market collapsed when it hit the 4.6 mark), once-in-a-lifetime low interest rates (which, as Governor of Canada Mark Carney warned, could rise more quickly than people are prepared for) and record high levels of personal debt is one that could very easily precipitate a significant real-estate correction. If it does, Canadians will be well within their rights to blame journalists like Julian Beltrame and the editors who republished his piece for not providing them with accurate and timely information.

Isn’t this just a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things, though? Perhaps. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of people out there in this country who are dangerously deluded about the true nature of real estate, and every time a journalist like Julian Beltrame gives something like the Royal LePage report a free pass they effectively give weight and credibility to those fantasies. I was standing in line at my local grocery store yesterday in front of three such unfortunate cases, young women – university age, most likely – who were discussing why it was always better to own than to rent, how renting constitutes “wasting” money and how real-estate always goes up. It was as though they were reading straight out of a CREA pamphlet, and it would have been funny if it weren’t so terribly sad. The housing industry has tried to pass these self-serving fables off as immutable laws on the universe, ones no more contestable than the law of gravity. I don’t blame them for it, either. But I do blame journalists who mindlessly propagate these mistruths on their behalf, free of both charge and context.

I’m not suggesting that journalists like Julian Beltrame are deliberately fudging the facts when it comes to real-estate in Canada. They may, in fact be the victims of the intellectual equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, in that they want their own homes to increase in value and so are willing to assign privilege to arguments that support that outcome. But their willingness to treat self-serving professional spin like fact doesn’t help an industry whose credibility is already being questioned by the average Canadian. The job of a journalist is to provide the public with the best information available. When it comes to the coverage of real-estate the overwhelming majority of journalists in this country are failing to meet that standard. If journalism is to survive as a viable profession, the people practicing it have to do – and be – better than that.