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

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

Orson Scott Card writes some very good books. Enders Game being probably his
most famous. And then He did a saga about humans returning to earth.
~Lance

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List <
gcfl-discuss at gcfl.net> wrote:

>  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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