By Orson Scott Card October 5, 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 benefitting 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 subprime mortgage loans
almost up to the minute they failed.
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts
Matter? "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 Franklin 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 daily newspaper in our city.
No comments:
Post a Comment