It Wasn?t a Collection Agency that Caused His Death, CNN

CNN ran a story last week with the headline, “Woman sues debt collector over husband’s death.” That seems pretty dramatic.

Honestly, this is a rehashing of a story that’s been around for a few weeks. I dismissed it when I first read it, and forgot about it. But then a co-worker forwarded it to me after one of his friends forwarded it to him, with the comment, “look at what these guys do,” intimating that we work for the “bad guys.”

I decided to read the story and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it would make for an interesting story: the headline certainly makes it seem like a debt collection agency took things too far, literally harassing a debtor to death.

But that’s not what the story is about. In fact, a collection agency isn’t involved at all in this story.

A woman in Florida is suing her mortgage company over calls it made when she and her husband fell behind on their mortgage payments in 2002. He died in 2005 from a heart condition. Not only are the details in the story very sketchy (it does not indicate when, exactly, the offending phone calls were made), but it horribly conflates actions taken by a creditor collection operation with those made by third party debt collection agencies.

Indeed, the CNN article – and those like it – launches into a description of FTC complaints against debt collectors to bolster its point. They even get a stock quote from ACA International about “bad apples” in the industry. The article mentions the FDCPA governing collectors, but makes no mention of the nuance involved in regulating original creditors under the law.

And this is what we have learned to live with. The real truth is so complicated and takes so many words to explain that writers have no real choice but to gloss over details. I do not blame ACA for their quote in the story, because they probably spoke about the actual case but that was cut because it was so boring, and the stock “most collectors are good, bad apples give us a bad name,” quote was used instead.

We as an industry have to do a better job of explaining why a headline of “Woman sues debt collector over husband’s death,” in this case is just plain wrong. We have to educate the media on why their current framing is incorrect. When you’re doing a story about a mortgage company harassing a debtor, it’s not a “debt collection” story in the traditional sense. It’s a story about a mortgage company harassing a debtor.