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

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. 

CMPQwk 1.42-21 9999 
Democrats --  The party of trickle-up poverty ....

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