Posted on 10/20/2008 10:29:44 AM PDT by quesney
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.
Tommy Johnson:
Well I wasn't usin' it.
In my Fantasy Number 2998, President McCain sets up a new Washington Press Corps free of MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, NY Times etc.
McCain would hold weekly press conferences on the Internet with live blogging Drudge, InstaPundit, Michele Malkin, and the rest of the Pajamas Media. Oh, throw in Fox.
Great column, of course, we all knew this already.
I love Card’s essays. There are some honorable Democrats still around, and he is one of the few left. Why he’s not a Republican is beyond me.
“Wasn’t the true reason that the Watergate breakin occurred was that John Dean wanted to remove comprimising information about his wife’s activities as the Heidi Fleiss of Washington?”
That’s the speculation. Certainly, the break-in didn’t have much of an upside for Nixon. As I heard someone once say, if he was looking for dirt to help him in the election, it would have been like the Yankees spying on some little league team with whom they were about to play an exhibition.
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.
Orson Scott Card's complaint about Big Journalism's participation in the Democratic Party's lies reminds me of an idealistic seeker of truth in the Soviet Union. The Soviets had a system for handling people who had complaints about the difference between Communist rhetoric and Communist reality.Any complaint was always "somebody else's" responsibility - so if you took a complaint to a bureaucrat, they would make you wait in interminable lines to get to see you, and then they would finally refer you somewhere else, more inconvenient than it had been even to get to see you. Most people eventually just gave up in frustration.
But if you were really determined, of course, there was always the gulag . . .
"Liberalism" and"progressivism" are simply positive labels which Big Journalism awards to politicians who participate in the con that criticism, condemnation, and complaint - cheap second guessing which is how journalists actually "earn" their daily bread - are more in the public interest than being "the man in the arena" and actually trying to get useful things done. When as and if Mr. Card finally realizes that journalism actually exists to be a propaganda arm of the party which exists to be coopted by it, there is always the option of becoming a neoconservative - a liberal who's been mugged by reality and can no longer exist within the system which raised him. At which point he will be a Republican - if an opposition party is still allowed in America by then . .
This ought to be sent to every journalist in America.
BTTT
But if you were really determined, of course, there was always the gulag . . .ROTFL A place for everything and everything in its proper place.
pflr
But if they win with Obama corrupt power triumphs over truth. Isn’t that what the election is about?
Conservative Mormon is not a political party :D . The poster asserted he was a Democrat. Its not news when a Republican, even a brilliant guy like OSC, criticizes Democrats.
I’ve visited his website from time to time and he always has something interesting, and adult, to say. He doesn’t update it frequently enough for me to visit it more often. I am just happy to have it in my favorites list.
marked. Wow.
BTTT!
Those EZ loans fed the economy and fed the boom. People were refinancing every year and taking cash out along the way.
That money bought cars, clothes, and a more comfortable lifestyle.
THAT’S why nobody did anything about it. There was no incentive.
Well, now that the prices are coming back down to where people can qualify the old fashioned way 33/38 ratios...or 35/40 FHA.
Business is really booming in bank-owned properties right now. People are buying and lenders are lending. Don’t believe all this crap out there.
*MEGA PING*
bttt
Read-this-earlier-just-heard-Rush-Limbaugh-read-this-on-his-show-today-read-it-again
Bump
I’m sending copies of this article to the networks and others with a sticky note that says “this pretty much sums up I no longer trust your network/newspaper/magazine as a credible news source.”
Wow. He is a very good writer. Clear and succinct. It will of course go for naught but it is nice to know that Diogones can find ONE honest democrat in the MSM.
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