Would The Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On The Lights?

[HankB]

Orson Scott Card is a science-fiction author of some note . . . he's written this open letter to the press . . . a few (very few!) papers have printed it.

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 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 news paper in our city.

[Manedwolf]

The chainsmoking, keyboard-pounding, relentless bulldog reporters of the past are gone.

What we have now is people who don''t want to offend the subject of their stories, lest they no longer get exclusive interviews.

[taurusowner]

Well, they don't want to offend the (D) half of their subjects, the other side they couldn't care less about.

[seeker_two]

Most "reporting" nowadays comes from press releases, phone polls,  or foreign newswires....actual "pounding the pavement" is not used anymore.....

Real news is hard to come by....that's why I dropped my journalism major in college....

[MechAg94]

I think I have read a few of his books.  Ender's Game I think.

[Ben]

Very well written. I'm passing that around.

[agricola]

Great piece.  No doubt in four years time when the wheels have fallen off utterly it will be inscribed in stone.

[Bogie]

Face it - "entertainment news" gets better ratings than just about any other kind of news... Except "sports news."

I suspect that in four years, we're either going to have a population that is significantly politically dumber, or one that is angry and informed...
 
Probably dumberer...

[Sergeant Bob]

We can also blame the fact (in my opinion) that 98% of the people in the U.S. have no clue as to what is really what the politicians are doing to this country. We, my friends, are the 2 percenters.

[Ben]

We, my friends, are the 2 percenters.

I will brag and say I spent two hours voting yesterday. Most of my time is spent on propositions. Much as a court case is started with a "presumed innocent", I jump into propositions with a "presumed NO vote". Propositions generally either increase my taxes, grow government, or create regulations, so in the spirit of smaller govt, I expect to vote no, and the proposition has to convince me to vote yes for it, which requires my reading multiple sources on both sides of the issue.

I can't help but wonder how many people vote on props based on the radio ads I hear about them, which never seem to even touch on the language of the actual proposition.

[FTA84]

I can't help but wonder how many people vote on props based on the radio ads I hear about them, which never seem to even touch on the language of the actual proposition.

I probably shouldn't say this but I will....

I was filling out my absentee ballot yesterday and called my mother to ask what she knew of the local school levy.  She said she did not vote for it because she had seen no yard signs, in fact, she admitted she didn't vote "Yes" for any propositions because she hasn't been seeing any yard signs.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

Ya gotta love Orson Scott Card.  He's always worth reading.

[Boomhauer]

The chainsmoking, keyboard-pounding, relentless bulldog reporters of the past are gone.

What we have now is people who don''t want to offend the subject of their stories, lest they no longer get exclusive interviews.

And the reporters of today do not know how to write, either. When I have better grammar, spelling, and sentence structure than many of the "journalists" that work at our local paper, that's pretty bad.

[agricola]

And the reporters of today do not know how to write, either. When I have better grammar, spelling, and sentence structure than many of the "journalists" that work at our local paper, that's pretty bad.

I dont know if I have mentioned this before, but there is a wonderful book available in the UK called Flat Earth News by Nick Davies that details the decline of journalistic integrity and general standards in the UK and identifies the reasons for the decline. 

One of his main points is that lots of "news" is in fact just copied verbatim from newswires, press releases and interviews without any kind of verification of whether it is actually accurate. "Balance" is obtained by providing two (or more) sources from either side of the argument, usually the ones that provide the most entertainment - rather than identifying what are the actual facts at hand and reporting those.  He also identifies the way in which lots of the media can adopt a theme on a given issue - he uses Iraq as an example, but it is equally applicable to Obama.

http://www.flatearthnews.net/

edit:  he also attacks the War on Drugs, in a section which is worth linking to:

http://www.flatearthnews.net/footnotes-book/page-28-heroin/whats-wrong-war-against-drugs