Series spreads the blame on economy
A couple of Sundays ago, the White House erupted with a fury. Spokeswoman Dana Perino accused the New York Times of “gross negligence.” Its reporters, she said, let their “myopic point of view” cloud their front-page story on President Bush’s role in the mortgage crisis.
A wave of complaints poured into the newspaper. Closer to home, a friend asked me if it wasn’t yet another proof of the left-wing media bias. So I thought I’d better take a look.
The 5,000-word article, “White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire,” piled a fair amount of blame on the president and his administration for failing to take control as the nation’s home loan industry spiraled beyond control.
Such a finding would naturally enrage not only the administration but the tens of millions of our fellow citizens who gorge themselves on talk radio and cable TV, where the bully blusterers serve up a regular diet of rage and blame against Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), other congressional Democrats and those pesky poor folks. (Darn ‘em, they want to own homes too!)
I see something else in the furor over the Times’ story: An audience that either willfully or honestly misses the point, ignoring what the newspaper reported and reacting with its heart rather than its head.
So here’s a little explication on the “Mortgage Bonfire,” a story that said both much more and much less than many readers and critics seem to have noticed.
The first and perhaps most important thing to understand about the lengthy investigative piece was that it was the 14th in a series dubbed “The Reckoning.” The stories, now numbering about 20, have held to account individuals and institutions for the economic crisis -- including ineffectual regulators, cash-happy foreign investors and profligate bankers. Democrats and stars of the Clinton administration take unwanted star turns.
Robert E. Rubin, an advisor on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is blamed in one story for loosening regulations on banks when he served as President Clinton’s Treasury secretary, then pushing Citigroup into investments that would cripple the banking giant.
Henry G. Cisneros, national housing czar under Clinton, takes a hit in another story for pushing an ill-conceived San Antonio, Texas, subdivision that would be ravaged by foreclosure. In one of the tale’s most telling moments, a buyer expresses incredulity that the developers let him get a loan.
“I was a student making $17,000 a year,” he says. “My wife was between jobs. In retrospect, how in hell did we qualify?”
Yet another article y in “The Reckoning” tells how mortgage giant Fannie Mae became impossibly bloated as “Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority home buyers.”
The Times could have brought even sharper focus on the failure of congressional Democrats, but it hardly forgave their slavish devotion to the company. In their cheerleading comments from the go-go days of the housing boom, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Rep. Frank appear particularly hapless.
The sheer length and breadth of the Times series delivered its own message: No single individual, agency or firm can be held responsible for the giant mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
The serial approach requires serial attention, dear readers. You can’t read a single chapter of the epic and have any clue of its sweep. (Notice to the many papers around the country that ran the Bush mortgage story: It wouldn’t hurt to expose your audience to the rest of “The Reckoning.”)
Even the Dec. 20 story hardly delivered a back-alley beating. My friend complained that the Times blamed Bush alone for the crisis. That’s not so, as becomes clear right near the top of the story, in what journalists call the “nut graphs.”
There, Times reporters Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton sum up their findings, saying it was a story with “plenty of culprits” and “partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making.”
If they thought they had the evidence to suggest that the president was “mostly” or “largely” responsible, none of us doubts the reporters would have said so. But they didn’t.
The story goes on to say that Bush had good intentions in trying to promote home ownership among more Americans. It tells how he “spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation” on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The overall thrust of the story is, to be sure, no air kiss to George Bush. It depicts the president as unwilling to heed warnings about the coming tempest.
Most damaging and painful to the White House, certainly, is the fact that it was not wild-eyed liberals who made up the bulk of the Times story but current and former members of the administration.
Bush’s former top economics advisor, Allan B. Hubbard, concedes that “we did not recognize the severity of the problems.” Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and his predecessor, John W. Snow, both acknowledge the push to expand home ownership went too far. Snow bemoans the White House’s unwillingness to compromise with Congress on a reform plan.
Such frank testimonials sometimes come from rats, jumping off a sinking administration’s ship.
But the Times reporters assembled insider critics of impressive stature. They got them in impressive numbers, and they got them to speak on the record.
That combination makes their words ring, not with expediency, but with truth. All their story really says is that President Bush was part of the problem, a conclusion that’s hard to deny if you read what’s there, and what’s not.
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