For decades, newspapers have considered the low rate of home ownership among the poor (and minorities) to be a travesty. Their front-page headlines have berated lenders for their "overly strict" standards and have implied that one of the reasons for loan denial has been racism, which has never been proved.
The Fourth Estate has been one of the primary movers in the current economic collapse, putting constant pressure on Congress to force lenders to hand out mortgages to the "underclass." And so Congress complied in the late 1970s and escalated their charge in the last six years.
The result is our current harrowing collapse. But you won't see any mea culpa on the front pages (or any pages) of a single newspaper in America, that I'm aware of.
You will, however, see far fewer full-page ads by car dealers, who are going out of business at record rates. There are noticeably thinner Sunday ad sections. And newspapers around the country are hurting in a big way as they watch revenues plummet. The jaundiced dream of a house over every poor head has brought the economic roof down upon the newspaper industry.
Some of this was occurring before the recent collapse, as the younger generations get more of their news and entertainment from the Internet, but the collapse has thrown more water onto the advertising fire of print journalism.
The justice of the above is refreshing and long overdue. Newspapers are having to lay off some of the socialists who fill their newsrooms and cutting back on raises for many of those remaining behind. (Perhaps they'll go get real jobs.) The Che Guevara-istas are left bemoaning allegedly corrupt corporate America while begging daily for more of corporate America's advertising dollars. Delicious irony that! Just the thought of the sturm und drang filling newsrooms delivers me to my kitchen for a bottle of red.
What goes around ... comes around.
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