An unpopular truth about the news you read

[unixronin]

Orson Scott Card on lies, damned lies, and election campaign reporting

OK, so you think Card is a religious fundamentalist.  In many ways, you may be right.

You may consider Card a homophobe.  I doubt he sees it that way, but you're within your rights to say that too.  If you're gay, I doubt the practical distinction matters to you.

Neither of those change the fact that what he has to say on this particular issue — honesty and objectivity in journalism — is perfectly true.  Judge the message, not the messenger.

Comments

(continued)

[skellington.livejournal.com]

If you want to point fingers somewhere, I'd look at some combination of (A) lots of cash from China and the third world pushing down interest rates, (B) the fed lowering interest rates to 1%, so short-term borrowing was really cheap, and (C) various governments letting banks and hedge funds dramatically increase their leverage creating money to chase risky investments. (The SEC allowed the investment banks to go from 12:1 leverage to 30:1 leverage in 2004, right when the boom really took off.)

I'd throw in some blame for the rating agencies, which called these securities "AAA", when they were crap. And some blame for the folks who created opaque complex financial derivities.

You can also blame the government for not listening when the appraisers said fraud was happening, inflating home prices. Or for not putting some restrictions on the "No Documentation" or "Low Documentation" loans (which were absurd and much of the cause of the problem.)

And since the Freddie&Fannie thing is major reason for criticizing the journalists, I'd say that the article is pretty weak. (Some of the other claims, such as that Freddie Raines ever provided advice for Obama's campaign, are also apparently false.)

For more details on Fannie and Freddie and low-income loans, take a look at:

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/10/cra_fannie_and.html and follow a bunch of their links.