October 29, 2008

• The image is of the bridge at Christine Falls in Washington State

  
  

  
  

  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.
  

  There are precedents.  Even though
  President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored
  or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that
  misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. 
  (Along the way, you
  created the false impression that Bush had lied to them
  and said that there was a connection.)

  If you had any principles, then
  surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and
  John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to
  approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be
  laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
  

  Your job, as journalists, is to tell
  the truth.  That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy
  or subscribe to your paper.

  But right now, you are consenting to
  or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be
  blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans.  You have trained the American
  people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are
  responding as you have taught them to.

  If you had any personal honor, each
  reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts
  the election chances of your favorite candidate.

  Because that's what honorable people
  do.  Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable
  consequences.  That's what honesty means .  That's how trust is
  earned.

  Barack Obama is just another
  politician, and not a very wise one.  He has revealed his ignorance and naivete
  time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
  

  Meanwhile, you have participated in
  the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of
  her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's
  own
  adultery for many months.

  So I ask you now: Do you have any
  standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?
  

  Is getting people to vote for Barack
  Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is
  supposed to stand for?

  You might want to remember the way
  the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting
  Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless
  women.  Who listens to NOW anymore?  We know they stand for nothing; they have
  no principles.

  That's where you are right now.
  

  It's not too late.  You know that if
  the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama,
  you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.
  

  If you want to redeem your honor,
  you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it
  were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign
  had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against
  tightening its lending practices.

  Then you will print them, even
  though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the
  reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they
  could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at
  Obama's door.

  You will also tell the truth about
  John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this
  crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration
  tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
  

  This was a Congress-caused crisis,
  beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading
  the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely
  fashion.

  If you at our local daily newspaper
  continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the
  Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
  

  If you do not tell the truth about
  the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you
  would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by
  any standard.

  You're just the public relations
  machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and
  real
  journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a
  news
  paper in our city.

  This article first appeared in
  The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North
  Carolina, and is used here by
  permission.

   

  • 1:09 pm
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