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By Greg Pierce

Roots of woe

"In the early 1990s, I attended a conference designed to teach journalists the tools of an emerging field known as computer-assisted investigative reporting," Steven Malanga writes at www.realclearmarkets.com

"One of the hottest sessions of the conference explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages," Mr. Malanga said.

"One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had already won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including The Washington Post and the Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with their own analysis based on government loan data. Everyone sounded keen to learn if their local banks were guilty, too.

"Although academic researchers leveled substantial criticisms against these newspaper efforts (namely, that they relied on incomplete data and did not take into account lower savings rates, higher debt levels, and higher loan-defaults rates for many minority borrowers), bank lending to minority borrowers still became an enormous issue - mostly because newspaper reporters and editors in this pre-talk radio, pre-blogging era were determined to make it so.

"Editorialists called for the government to force banks to end the alleged discrimination, and they castigated federal banking regulators who said they saw no proof of wrongdoing in the data.

"Eventually, the political climate changed, and Washington became a believer in the story. ...

"Of course, the new federal standards couldn't just apply to minorities. If they could pay back loans under these [looser] terms, then so could the majority of loan applicants. Quickly, in other words, these became the new standards in the industry."

Leadership crisis

"At Harvard's Center for Public Leadership, which I have the privilege of directing, we have taken public surveys in each of the past three years measuring confidence in our nation's leadership. Our surveys have been done in partnership with U.S. News & World Report as well as Yankelovich," David Gergen writes at cnn.com.