* Bonus link: “There is no liberal bias in the New York Times, because here everybody thinks like me…” Â Clark Hoyt, “public editor” of the New York Times, weighs in once again on the topic of journalistic bias–and, once again, finds it to be nonexistent…
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott 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.
                   
* Making sense of the financial meltdown:
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.
Is November 4, 2008 more a coup d’etat than it is a general election?
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