Would the last honest reporter turn on the lights?

Here's an excellent piece to read. Orson Scott Card, best selling author, self-declared Democrat, and a Mormon, calls the newspapers in America to task for basically false reporting–or at least for the lack of honest coverage–about the causes of the financial/housing crisis.

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.

Read the rest of the article here.

From where I sit, the majority of the media is so sold out that there is little honesty or integrity left in American journalism. It's beginning to look a lot like Russia in the early 1900's. Don't give the masses the truth. Give them the propaganda and slowly cook them to death like the frog in a pot.

-rlh-