Confronting Liberal Media Bias

The Economy, The Federal Reserve and The Mortgage Crisis (Balancing out the Liberal Media Bias with information not reported on, nor emphasized or just flat out biased that may have a negative effect toward values voters) Also, see Mortgage Crisis "If Fannie and Freddie were private entities, they would be a considered a monopoly by Department of Justice anti-trust guidelines".

19 Times Bigger than Enron, and the Networks Didn't See It Coming-"Since Jan. 1, 2008, only four network news stories have included any criticism of Fannie and Freddie. Even the flood of reports since July 8 (when concerns began to surface that the two organizations might have to raise more capital) has provided little historical context for the situation. Warnings about Fannie and Freddie have been issued by print media and economic experts at least since 2002....Unlike the three networks, which were praising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier in the year, The Wall Street Journal has been sounding an alarm bell about the corruption and financial danger of the lenders’ practices for more than six years. The Journal has run at least 29 editorials or op-eds exposing the two businesses for political connections, preferential regulation, and Enron-like “cooking” of the books....In the case of Fannie Mae, the network media have a history of underreporting the scandal. But everyone who was watching the network news in 2001-2002 knew about Enron, a company that overstated its earnings by millions of dollars, damaging its employees and shareholders when the truth came out. Compared to the Fannie Mae scandal of 2004, Enron was a drop in the bucket – yet the problems weren’t splashed on TV news night after night. As the truth came out, the problems at Fannie Mae in 2004 were 19 times bigger than Enron, with roughly $11 billion in earnings restatements. Yet, the TV news media on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC barely made a peep...The 2005 BMI special report “Government-Sponsored Enron” found that when comparing time periods at the height of those respective scandals, a search for “Enron” yielded 3,017 hits in LexisNexis, compared to a meager 37 hits for “Fannie Mae.” That search included ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN...As Reuters explained on July 11, 2008, “Fannie Mae in particular has strong connections to Democratic politics.” In addition to Raines and Gorelick, “former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson headed John Kerry's vice presidential search team, and was doing the same job for Obama but left the post after reports he received favorable mortgage interest rates as a result of his ties to the chief executive of the troubled mortgage lender Countrywide Financial.” BMI wrote in 2005 that Fannie’s potential fall would be a “lose-lose situation.” If Fannie’s trillion-dollar portfolio were to falter, the shareholders would absorb the loss. On the other hand, if the U.S. were to bail out the mortgage giant, taxpayers would foot the bill. The National Taxpayers Union (NTU) estimated that such a bailout could mean an additional cost of nearly $2,000 for every American:...Newsweek’s Charles Gasparino was asked why the Fannie Mae scandal wasn’t being reported like Enron, during an appearance on CNN’s “Newsnight with Aaron Brown” Dec. 28, 2004. “Well, Fannie Mae is a very politically corrupt – it may be politically corrupt, but it’s a politically correct company. I mean, they do all the things that, let’s face it, liberal journalists like, like put home mortgages out there for poor people. And so right now, beating up on Fannie Mae is kind of politically incorrect,” said Gasparino. “This is a huge story, and it’s going overlooked.”

Morning Bell: A Conservative Approach to Fixing the Housing Market-"Congress created Freddie and Fannie to help increase home ownership by expanding the flow of money into the housing market. Ruthlessly leveraging their government backed advantage to borrow money at lower rates, Freddie and Fannie have metastasized into a housing market leviathan that is far too big for the federal government to allow to fail. Combined, Freddie and Fannie have $5 trillion in liabilities from mortgage-backed securities and other debt. To put that in perspective, the total U.S. federal debt is $9.5 trillion and total U.S. gross domestic product is $14 trillion....Fannie and Freddie are at the core of the housing crisis. In 1995 Fannie and Freddie convinced the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to let them get affordable-housing credits for buying subprime securities that included risky loans to low-income borrowers. In 2003 Fannie and Freddie bought $81 billion in subprime securities. In 2004 they bought $175 billion — 44% of the subprime market. Due to higher-than-expected mortgage default rates, Fannie and Freddie have suffered combined losses of more than $11 billion in the nine months ended March 31."

Morning Bell: Seize This Opportunity-"Liberals continue to insist that Fannie and Freddie can still be forces for good if only the proper rules are put in place to control their behavior. What the liberals ignore — when they are not being completely ignorant about the true role Fannie and Freddie played in the current crisis — is that Fannie and Freddie have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to be as free from regulatory oversight as possible. The time to bring the free market back to the U.S. housing financial system has come: Fannie and Freddie must go."

Fannie, Freddie Spent Millions Lobbying-"For years, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tenaciously worked to nurture, and then protect, their financial empires by invoking the political sacred cow of homeownership and fielding an army of lobbyists, power brokers and political contributors....Over the past decade, both Fannie and Freddie made the list of Washington's top 20 lobbying spenders. They spent a combined $170 million to cultivate allies during that period, a bit less than the American Medical Association and a bit more than General Electric. At the same time, their executives have consistently led the mortgage-banking sector in campaign giving to members of Congress, contributing a combined $16.2 million since 1997."

Who Does Paul Krugman Think He’s Fooling? -"In 1995, President Bill Clinton’s HUD agreed to let Fannie and Freddie get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers. The idea was that subprime lending benefited many borrowers who did not qualify for conventional loans.... Fannie and Freddie purchased 44 percent of the subprime securities in 2004. Does that sound like the behavior of an innocent bystander to you?"

The Federal Reserve (another government factor)

Econ 101: Is the Fed a Source of Our Economic Problems?-"Politicians and pundits are crying about the economy, from oil prices to housing and the U.S. dollar. But they rarely pause to consider how we arrived at our situation, as they call for more government help and often for the Federal Reserve to “do something.”...The Fed reduced the federal funds rate from 6.5 percent in 2001 to 1 percent by June of 2003 and held the rate there for a year. In a series of moves, the Fed then increased the federal funds rate. By June 2006, the rate had been increased to 5.25 percent. The Fed began lowering the rate again starting in November of 2007 until it had reached 2 percent by April of 2008, where it currently remains. This Federal Reserve policy resulted in changes in economic activity that are explained differently by different economic theorists...There may be a number of factors explaining high oil and other commodity prices, a declining dollar, and a recession in the housing industry. But the work of the late Nobel Laureates Friedman and Hayek points to a monetary policy that kept interest rates artificially too low for too long. Their work should give us pause about using government to correct what are perceived as market failures, and to consider that what we are really observing is government failure."

Newsweek Poll

Nets Highlighted 15 Point Obama Lead, Yawn When it Falls to 3 -"Three weeks ago when a Newsweek poll put Democrat Barack Obama 15 points ahead of Republican John McCain, the ABC and CBS evening newscasts highlighted the out of sync finding. But when a new Newsweek survey released Friday placed Obama a mere three points in front of McCain, neither ABC's World News nor the CBS Evening News mentioned it on Friday or Saturday night....Three weeks later: "Glow Fading? The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by only 3 points. What a difference a few weeks can make," posted on Friday, July 11. An excerpt from the story by Jonathan Darman: A month after emerging victorious from the bruising Democratic nominating contest, some of Barack Obama's glow may be fading. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month's NEWSWEEK Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent...."