Turn your mind back to August 2005. The Uptown paper of record was deep into examining the nation’s mortgage lending. But not for the funny-money lending practices which would cause trillions in losses just a few years later. No, true to its crusading, right-every-perceived-wrong nature, the Uptown paper was looking for racial discrimination in mortgage lending. Not surprisingly they found it.

Or at least enough statistical cover to churn out a three-part series declaring, as editor Rick Thames put it, “that to be black in America is to be much more likely to pay a higher interest rate for a home purchase loan.” Of course Thames and his reporters found nothing of kind. They did not have the actual details of the borrowers’ credit history to be able to draw such a sweeping conclusion, but they did anyway.

And in doing so furthered the bankers’ real agenda.

You see, since the early 90s bankers like Hugh McColl had figured out what a wonderful briar patch claims of racial discrimination in their lending practices could be. They could use the claims to then partner with activist groups like ACORN to “fix” this terrible problem, announce millions in “targeted” loan programs, pledge to regulators to be “creative” in approving “non-traditional” borrowers — and thereby be guaranteed tens of billions in new business opportunities via unopposed mergers and newly lowered lending standards.

In sum, it was win-win with pennies on the dollar for the banks every time some reporter or editor resolved to show their j-skool cred, build their clipfile, and enter a few contests by Sticking It To the Men in the big bad banks. Of course, at the same time the banks’ covered their legal behinds by moving to fairly objective credit scores that would avert actual high-dollar loan discrimination claims in the courts where the specifics of a loan would matter. But if a handful of guys and gals who didn’t know a balance sheet from a dryer sheet wanted to write up 35-point “Discrimination!” heds based on incomplete data? Hey, we can work with that.

Now, however, with the financial meltdown brought on by a couple decades of lax lending as a backdrop comes a New York Federal Reserve Bank study on the question of minority borrowers being “steered” into higher interest subprime loans. The conclusion after looking at 75,000 loans, including data on credit scores? “If any pricing differential exists, minority borrowers appear to pay slightly lower rates,” the authors write.

Of course this finding does not impact the discrimination industry in the slightest. Minorities might have paid higher upfront fees for the loans, you see, and this data is not addressed by the study. But common sense says as we are talking about subprime loans, almost all borrowers rolled fees and closing costs into the loan. Even if we assume the dirty, bad bankers doubled those fees on all minority borrowers — we are talking a very small increase in the over all amount of the loan and the monthly loan payment.

Better not take a chance, though. Let’s work up a multi-part series and a special federal program to fix it.