Danny Schechter - ColdType

According to exhaustive studies by the Federal Reserve
Board and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), African
Americans are 250% more likely to get a loan with an
“exploding interest” clause than white borrowers – and notably,
the higher the income and the better the credit rating of a
Black borrower, the more likely the discrimination….
Yet, not a peep from the Obama Administration about ending
this Ku Klux lending practice which has laid waste Black
neighborhoods and taken a hunk of White America’s housing
values with it.
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And not a peep in our media except for the occasional lawsuit
as one in Illinois where State Attorney General Lisa Madigan
sued Wells Fargo for unfair lending and racial discrimination
against Hispanics and African Americans.
As a professional media critic with a long and frustrating
tenure in the trenches, I have been especially sensitive to, and
critical of, our media’s failure to monitor this aspect of the
financial crisis, failure to delve into the many crimes behind it,
and failure to warn us about what was coming.
There has been a media failure, as well as a financial failure.
I am not the only one to write about this. Charlie Beckett of
the London School of Economics (LSE) spells out the problem,
in an introduction to “What Is Financial Journalism,” a
thoughtful academic report about these failures.
“For once,” he writes, “we can’t blame the news media for
creating this mess or for the cost of clearing it up. However,
it does make us ask about the ability of journalism to report
upon financial affairs in a way that lets the public know what
is really going on. In that sense, the limits of financial journalism
may have contributed to the present disaster.”
At the same time, I have drawn on experience as a “news
dissector” to separate the wheat from chaff, referencing useful
reporting by diligent and concerned journalists in a book that
is both an investigation into criminality and an effort at media