[GCFL-discuss] FW: Thought you would find this ARTICLE interesting

Tue Nov 4 10:42:52 CST 2008

for evaluation.

greenBubble 

Subject: Fw: Thought you would find this ARTICLE interesting

Too little, too late, and no newspaper would have printed this anyway.

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html

Sent: Thu 10/30/2008 1:50 PM
Subject: ARTICLE

Snopes confirms that the article is legitimate-------JM 

The author exists and wrote the article, and the paper, Rhinoceros Times
in Greensboro, NC is real.  gB

The following article written on October 5th by a writer for the
Rhinoceros Times in Greensboro, NC by the name of Orson Scott Card. Card
is a liberal leaning writer, but he has always been first and foremost a
journalist. 

	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
<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 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.

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