[Grovenet] Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

[Steven]

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and
in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of
journalism.


An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in
America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism.
You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public,
because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague
emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to
loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to
poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky
loans.

What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be
able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would
help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these people to give
them a loan that they can't repay?

They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose
the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One
political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly
to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and
tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions
to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible
loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.
It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political
campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here?  Doesn't journalism require that you who produce
our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the
only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?
Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were
benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or
to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast
scandal.  "Housing-gate," no doubt.  Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both
Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush
administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go
even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute
they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts
Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com ): "Alan Greenspan warned them
four years ago.  So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to
the President.  So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts.  This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The
party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party.
The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican
deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to
account for her lie.  Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense
at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What?  It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is
the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.  And
after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while
running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential
candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called
it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day
about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this
story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the
Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually
let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because
Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you
would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was
put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly
corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would
find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow
Republicans were to blame for this crisis.