" Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?"

Courtesy the Powerline Blog, we learn that Science Fiction author and columnist Orson Scott Card has published an open letter to journalists. (This essay was originally published in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina; the link goes to Meridian Magazine.)

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?": "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.

....

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.

I deleted a bunch of Mr. Card attempting to school American journalism on the topics of ethics and honor and responsibility, because It Is To Laugh--or To Weep.

He could easily have added, If John McCain had reneged on his promise to accept public funding for his presidential campaign, and Barack Obama had abided by his promise to do so, including the limitations on donations that go along with such acceptance, the press would have excoriated McCain endlessly for being an oath-breaker.

He could also have added, If John McCain was spending the kind of money Obama is, they would accuse McCain of Trying to Buy The Presidency.

He might have pointed out that it is absurd to cry about Sarah Palin's alleged lack of experience, while pretending Obama is not similarly inexperienced.

And he might have said that McCain and the GOP have never mentioned race, but Obama can't stop accusing the GOP of "They'll try to scare you because I'm black!" (I see that he has gone to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother; wonder if she will mention that "Typical White Person" thing...?) And that voting for someone because of their race or creed or color or gender or whatever is morally the same as voting against them for any of those reasons.

I'm waiting for someone to warn of massive civil unrest in case Obama loses--or wins, for that matter.

Oddly enough, today's episode of Phil Foglio's Buck Godot includes the following line: "Nobody really understood it, but as it called for the euthanasia of vast herds of journalists, nobody really tried too hard."

Next time I see Phil, I'll have to ask him when he started pushing Utopian philosophies...