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Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

by Orson Scott Card

October 20, 2008
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 Sen. 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 subprime 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/457to): "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 Fred 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' 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 (NOW) 
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 daily newspaper in our city.
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32