Back when I was a member of the mainstream media the worst thing you could say of a reporter was that he recycled government press releases into news stories without adding any reporting to the mix. What was once rare is now commonplace.
Take, for example, the Associated Press story on Oct. 16 about the Obama administration’s newly unveiled program to “provide help to thousands of home buyers and renters.”
Anyone who has been paying attention for the past year knows that providing mortgages to unqualified home buyers with inadequate credit, and demanding little or no down payment, is exactly how we got into the mess we’re in. But you’d never know that by reading the AP account. Nowhere in the piece is what could be called “the other side of the story.”
Instead, the AP reporter relies only on Obama administration sources, who, of course, praise the “new” program (emphasis mine):
The government said the new effort was designed to provide hundreds of thousands of affordable mortgages for working families and enable the development and rehabilitation of tens of thousands of affordable rental properties.
Treasury, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in a joint news release that the new program would provide temporary support to local housing financing agencies and encourage them to return to relying on market sources for their capital as quickly as possible.
The local and state housing finance agencies, which provide loans to people with low or moderate incomes, have had a hard time raising money to fund loans due to the housing crisis and credit crunch.
And why have people who give loans to “low or moderate income” people had trouble raising money? Could it be because, after years of lending to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t make their mortgage payments, the housing bubble burst and helped ruin the economy as we know it? I could point the AP to a hundred people in Washington who would have made that very obvious point.
It would have made the story balanced, and it would have enlightened the reader with meaningful context. It also would have indicated to the reader that this “new” policy is not new at all, and in fact has been tried before with disastrous results.
Which may be why that is never mentioned in the story.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.