News Fit to Print. (Media/Politics)

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Scholars and think tanks love to crunch numbers. And their numbers can provide citizens with useful information about how their metropolitan area or state is performing, both absolutely and relatively. The local media have only been tapping a small portion of this output, but the May 2 St. Louis Post-Dispatch was an instructive exception. It had two front-page stories based on national studies, one on black-white differences in mortgage rates and the other on public-university tuition.

Neither had much good to say about St. Louis or Missouri. The home financing study, titled "Risk or Race" and released by the Center for Community Change, finds that the St. Louis region leads the nation's metropolitan areas in racial disparity on high-interest mortgage loans.

Local blacks are six …