Bubbleheads and Dupes - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Bubbleheads and Dupes
by

WASHINGTON — The decline of the New York Times continues, alas and egad. On Monday the Times was duped by some scoundrel who sent the newspaper’s website a rude email about Caroline Kennedy, signed supposedly by Bertrand Delanoë, “Mayor of Paris.” Now the Times has had to admit, “We posted a letter that carries the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fake. It should not have been published. Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.”

Well, I for one would like to take a look at the marmoreal tablets proclaiming the Times‘ “standards.” I do not doubt that the journalists there hold to some sort of standards, but frankly I doubt their standards have much to do with journalism or with objectivity. Just the day before being duped by a phony French mayor the newspaper again duped itself and its readers. On its front page it ran an interminable report on the provenance of the housing bubble and the subsequent nationwide credit freeze. For months serious scholars have been laying the blame on government housing policy that originated in the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act only to become really dangerous in the Clinton Administration. After that the bubble ballooned and in 2007 burst.

Yet the Times, in the thousands of words it spilled out claiming to explain the crisis, hardly mentioned the Clinton Administration. Instead it laid total blame on the Bush Administration and poor old George in particular. So Mayor Delanoë’s letter was the second “fake” to appear in the Times this week. Yet I have read no apology. Do the editors at the Times believe their tendentious work will engender a great debate about the origins of the 2008 recession?

The American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison is perhaps the country’s foremost authority on the housing bubble. He has been writing about it and speaking out for months. In the Times‘ report neither he nor his thesis is even mentioned.

In the next issue of The American Spectator Wallison will explain: “Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years — particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to distort the housing credit system — is what underlies the current crisis.”

Wallison supports the second narrative and has no difficulty winning his case. Most devastatingly he cites the Times‘ own published chart from December 21. It shows American homeownership growth since 1990. In 1993 homeownership stood at 63%. By the end of the Clinton Administration it had grown to 68%. Through all the Bush years it grew by but 1%. Equally devastating, Wallison recalls a 1999 news story from the Times reporting that the Clinton Administration was importuning on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax standards and extend lending to low income homebuyers. What Wallison is too gentlemanly to add is that in this 1999 story the Times quotes a housing expert who warns that the Fannie and Freddie policies might require a government bailout. The housing expert’s name is Wallison.

So revealing the fakery of this news report is not difficult. But what is also worth mentioning is that the Times in its ambitious partisanship has created another political controversy that need not have been created. The origin of this bubble and credit freeze is clear. How to resolve it and prevent similar crises is the question to be addressed today. Instead the Times wants — so to speak — to throw shoes at George Bush. The Times is not only unreliable, it is uncouth.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
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R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief ofThe American Spectator. He is the author of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: The Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn’t Work: Social Democracy’s Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; The Clinton Crack-Up; and After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery. He makes frequent appearances on national television and is a nationally syndicated columnist, whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, National Review, Harper’s, Commentary, The (London) Spectator, Le Figaro (Paris), and elsewhere. He is also a contributing editor to the New York Sun.
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