Major Media Misinforms Public : A Biased Agenda

More facts from a good source, Investor's Business Daily, that proves the main stream media is on the wrong side of the truth. The truth, be it known, is that the media doesn't want the general public to know the truth about who was responsible for our tragic financial mess.

The main stream media is wholly invested in defending the far left liberal agenda of big government and less freedom of thought. Little wonder why the liberal agenda includes crushing talk radio, the "fairness doctrine", favored in Obama's new socialist reforms.

The media is a large part of the problem in solving this mess as it doesn't allow the public to become informed. WOW - silly me - not allowing the public become inform is the whole point of the media. It appears the media makes sure that misinformation is the rule rather than facts. Who Knew?

Keep the faith, the battle goes on to defend our right to free speech and the entire Bill of Rights, maybe even the very Constitution itself.


The Subprime Lending Bias
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, December 19, 2008

Media:* If, as they say, it's journalists who write history's first
draft, then future texts will be riddled with errors about the origins
of the subprime disaster, teaching future leaders the wrong lessons.

Just how did Americans come to lose $10 trillion in real estate and
stock wealth? And why are our children and grandchildren on the hook for
as much as $8 trillion in federal bailout money? These are some of the
most important questions of our time. Yet the mainstream media, plagued
by monopartisan bias, are not providing the public honest answers.

Take, for instance, a recent front-page article in the Washington Post,
under the headline, "How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed the Crisis." The piece
correctly fingers HUD for helping fuel risky lending at Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac. But the newspaper starts its analysis in 2004 (in fact, the
first sentence begins, "In 2004 . . . "), making it seem as if the Bush
administration crafted "affordable housing" policy and created the
subprime market.

The Post knows better. The Bush HUD merely continued a politically
correct policy launched by the Clinton administration. For the first
time, President Clinton ordered HUD to set quotas for Fannie and Freddie
to buy huge portions of Community Reinvestment Act loans and other
low-income mortgages made to borrowers with poor credit. The Post failed
to mention this key fact.

By 2000, fully half of the mortgage giants' portfolios consisted of
these risky loans, most of them subprime mortgages. In effect, the
Clinton HUD set a time bomb that would explode years later with the
collapse of home prices, which happened to occur on Bush's watch.

At the same time, HUD pressured the federally subsidized giants to lower
their loan-to-value ratios and other underwriting requirements to
accommodate minority borrowers. HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo even admitted
that the administration was mandating a policy of "affirmative action"
lending (his words, not ours).

And it was Clinton who initially spread the subprime rot to Wall Street.
To help Fannie and Freddie reach their "affirmative action" lending
quotas, HUD in 1995 let them get affordable-housing credit for buying
subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers.

Less than two years later, Freddie partnered with Wall Street investment
banker Bear Stearns to issue the first securitizations of low-income CRA
loans.

There's even a press release still available on the Web that
memorializes the historic deal, which dumped hundreds of millions of
dollars in the risky loans on the market — a down payment on the
hundreds of billions that were to follow.

The Post left all of that out of its story, even though the deal marked
the beginning of the boom in subprime securities.

Of course, providing such background to readers would ruin the
impression that Bush and Republicans were responsible for the crisis, an
impression the Post and other liberal media elites hope will stick in
the public's mind and become conventional wisdom. And conventional
wisdom, once galvanized, is a powerful thing in Washington. Whole
agendas and coalitions are built around it.

The Post also provided just one side of the data in its story. The paper
said that Bush "ratcheted up" the affordable-housing goal for Fannie and
Freddie, from 50% to 56%. But it left out the fact that the previous
president, the liberal Democrat, institutionalized the quota and
ballooned it up to 50%. Which move do you think had a greater impact on
the subprime market?

A recent story in the Associated Press was equally tendentious. It
blamed Bush for not cracking down on loose lending standards that had
become the norm in the mortgage industry, while completely ignoring the
systematic dismantling of those standards during the previous decade
under Clinton.

"The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of
its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted the
value of government intervention in the economy," wrote AP Washington
correspondent Matt Apuzzo.

Reality check: "Government intervention" is what planted the seed to
this whole crisis. As we've noted, Clinton in 1995 revised CRA
regulations to pressure banks into adopting "flexible" lending standards
to increase minority homeownership. In a 1,389-word story, AP cited that
easily verifiable fact not a single time.

Make no mistake: It was Clinton who forced banks — most importantly,
Fannie and Freddie — to go into the subprime market to serve the
targeted populations that HUD and other Clinton banking regulators
wanted them to serve.

In effect, the media are blaming Bush for Clinton policies. Whoever
controls the debate in Washington controls the truth. Right now, it's
Democrats and their press courtiers. And so far, they've managed to
shade the truth about the root causes of this epochal financial crisis.