Jeff Binkley -> All wrote:



 JB> http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html

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

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

Orson Scott Card is more than just a newspaper columnist. He's an award
winning author of Sci-Fi and fantasy adventure novels. He won the Nebula
award for his "Ender" Sci-Fi series. He's also a member of the
LDS Church.

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

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

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

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

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

 JB> The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially
 JB> would help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these
 JB> people to give them a loan that they can't repay?  They get into a
 JB> house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house —
 JB> along with their credit rating.

 JB> They end up worse off than before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 JB> Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who
 JB> is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

 JB> And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million
 JB> while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one
 JB> presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on
 JB> housing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 JB> That's where you are right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the idiots on the left attack Card.

Ed

-- 
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools." --Herbert Spencer
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