“Darrell Issa’s Credibility Collapses”: Feeding Bogus Stories To Unsuspecting Journalists
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has a favorite trick: his staff puts together a partial transcript of closed-door testimony, they edit it in a misleading way to advance a far-right narrative, and then they look for a news organization who’ll fall for the scam.
This week, the trick involved Henry Chao, HealthCare.gov’s chief project manager at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and an alleged memo involving security risks. CBS News fell victim to Issa’s swindle, and as was first reported right here on Maddow Blog, the story was quickly proven fraudulent.
At an Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) questioned Chao on this point directly, made clear that the CBS report was wrong, and saw Chao explain that his words had been “rearranged” by the partial transcript Issa released.
But wait, there’s more.
Issa also insisted this week that the White House directed the CMS to disable the so-called “anonymous shopper” function of the Affordable Care Act’s website in order to prevent “sticker shock.” How’d that work out?
Three weeks ago, Issa alleged that the White House ordered contractors to disable the “anonymous shopper” function that would allow people to compare plans. “The White House was telling them they needed these changes,” he told CBS News. Why? He told Fox News that the administration “buried the information about the high cost of Obamacare” so that consumers wouldn’t get “sticker shock.”
In testimony Wednesday, however, an administration IT expert testified that he ordered the “shopper” function disabled until defects could be repaired and that there had been no political interference.
“So when Chairman Issa stated on national television that the White House ordered you . . . to disable the shopper function in September for political reasons, to avoid consumer sticker shock, that’s not true, is it?” asked Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.).
Issa immediately objected, but it was too late – Issa’s lie (which is to say, his latest in a series of lies) had been exposed. The Republican said Tierney was mischaracterizing his claims, so Tierney read Issa’s discredited arguments out loud. (See the video http://youtu.be/oNSQn2zVdSU.)
I’m sure Issa and his office will continue to feed bogus stories to unsuspecting journalists. I’m less sure why anyone would keep falling for the same nonsense from someone lacking all credibility.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 14, 2013
“No Outside Commission Here”: Lara Logan Won’t Lose Her Job Because CBS Doesn’t Fear Liberals The Way It Fears Conservatives
In case you haven’t heard, CBS News is in a bit (but only a bit) of hot water over a story 60 Minutes recently aired about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. It centered on a breathless account from a security contractor, who just happened to have written a book about it being published by a conservative imprint of a publishing house owned by CBS (that’s synergy, baby). He told of the harrowing events of that night, including his own heroism and the spinelessness of the big shots who sit in their cushy offices while men of action like him do what must be done and get hung out to dry. The only problem was, he appears to be a liar who fabricated much of what 60 Minutes relayed in the story, which was reported by Lara Logan.
After insisting for weeks that everything in its story checked out, CBS finally conceded that the contractor, one Dylan Davies, was lying to them and through them to their audience. On Sunday night, Logan delivered an extraordinarily half-assed on-air apology, full of passive verbs and obfuscations plainly intended to minimize the whole thing; most critically, it gave no indication that CBS is going to make any effort to figure out why it happened. So who’s going to be punished for this enormous screw-up? I’ll tell you who: Nobody.
We’ll get to why in a moment. This incident has been compared to the one that occurred back in 2004, when Dan Rather aired a report on 60 Minutes II relying on documents purporting to show the steps taken by George W. Bush and his family to get him into the “Champagne Unit” of the Texas Air Guard so that he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam, and documenting what he did and didn’t do once he got in. The documents proved to be forgeries (essentially an effort to frame a guilty man, but that’s a topic for another day), and the fallout was severe. 60 Minutes II was canceled, four producers were fired, and Rather himself, despite a storied decades-long career at CBS, was pushed out as well; he gave his last broadcast as anchor of the CBS Evening News in the spring of 2005 (here’s the whole story).
A lot of people thought it happened because Dan Rather was a liberal who was out to get Bush. There’s no doubt where Lara Logan stood on Benghazi; here’s a speech she gave in 2012, making clear her belief that investigations are for pussies and what the U.S. needed to do was start killing some people posthaste: “The last time we were attacked like this was the USS Cole, which was a prelude to the 1998 embassy bombings, which was a prelude to 9/11,” she said. “And you’re sending in FBI to investigate? I hope to God that you’re sending in your best clandestine warriors who are going to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, that its ambassadors will not be murdered, and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.” With the talk of “exact[ing] revenge,” Logan sounded less like a journalist who values the perception of fairness and objectivity and more like a right-wing radio host. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she was incapable of subsequently producing careful, accurate reporting on the topic. The problem is, she didn’t.
But Logan won’t get pushed out like Rather did. The first reason is that Rather was heading toward the end of his career; folks at CBS were already looking past him. Logan, on the other hand, is young, beautiful (this is television we’re talking about, after all), and perceived as a rising star. But much more important is that there was an organized campaign to get Rather, and there isn’t an organized campaign to get Logan, at least not one that CBS fears.
It’s true that Media Matters has been criticizing this story from the beginning, though it hasn’t actually called for Logan or anyone else to get fired (full disclosure: I worked at Media Matters from 2005 to 2009). But it’s basically alone. There aren’t Democratic senators holding hearings, there aren’t a hundred left-wing radio hosts drumming up outrage, and there’s little visible pressure coming from the White House to encourage heads to roll. In the case of the National Guard report, the conservative movement put on a top-to-bottom, full-court press to make sure Dan Rather was punished. They had hated him for years, and when they got their chance they did everything in their power to crush him.
The plain fact of it is that news organizations like CBS are afraid of the right, but they aren’t afraid of the left. Big media outlets like CBS are terrified of right-wing pressure campaigns, precisely because most journalists are, in fact, liberals. That doesn’t mean the news has a liberal bias (there are lots of biases in the news, and reporters injecting their ideological beliefs about policy into their stories is about the 20th most consequential), but it does mean that they’re overly sensitive about being called liberal. The way they usually handle that fear is to bend over backward to be contemptuous of Democrats and to take every opportunity they can to prove that they aren’t what conservatives say they are.
If Logan got fired for this—or if anybody got fired for this—well that would only be taken by the right as evidence that those liberals at CBS will do Barack Obama’s bidding. And that’s the last thing they want to be seen as doing. After the National Guard story, CBS went so far as to hire an outside commission to investigate; it produced a 224-page report on the matter, and all those people got fired, including the news division’s biggest star. Is it going to do anything similar with the Benghazi story debacle? I wouldn’t bet on it. More likely CBS is just going to say, we made some mistakes but it’s all in the past now, and we have full confidence in Lara Logan’s journalistic integrity and professionalism. Move along, nothing to see here.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 12, 2013
“The Obamacare Bait And Switch”: America’s Beloved Health Insurance Industry Demonstrates Why We Needed Reform All Along
So here’s my advice: If you’re somebody who’s smoking hot about the Big Lie of the Affordable Care Act — you know, how President Obama told everybody that if they liked their current health insurance policy they could keep it — do yourself a favor. Avoid the county fair midway.
Because if you go, you’re apt to encounter a quick-handed scoundrel running a shell game, and that boy will take your money. Doubtless Obama should have said almost everybody could keep their current plan, or that 95 percent could, but he apparently found that too, um, subtle for the campaign trail.
So now old Mitt “47-percent” Romney gets to call him a liar.
But while your attention’s fixed on the president’s “mendacity,” and “paternalism,” to quote one characteristically overwrought scribe, America’s beloved health insurance industry is demonstrating exactly why we needed reform all along. Certain companies are taking advantage of the political confusion to sell people in the “individual market” far more expensive plans than they need and blame “Obamacare.”
As usual, the nation’s esteemed political media have gone along for the ride. CBS News, rapidly morphing into Fox News Lite, presented the heartbreaking tale of one Diane Barrette, a 56 year-old Floridian who got a letter from her insurance company cancelling her $54 a month policy and offering a replacement for $591 a month—a lot of money to her.
CBS correspondent Jan Crawford, deemed smart enough to cover the U.S. Supreme Court, took Barrette’s story at face value. The idea that health insurance worth having could be purchased at a monthly cost of less than a steak dinner apparently failed to arouse her reporter’s curiosity.
Poor Barrette choked up telling CBS her story, leading to several appearances on Fox News itself.
Had CBS done elementary due diligence, they’d have learned why Ms. Barrette’s plan was so cheap. Reporters who did learned that among other shortcomings, it didn’t cover hospitalization. In reality, she had no health insurance at all. A serious accident or illness might have bankrupted her—precisely the kind of ripoff the Affordable Care Act makes illegal.
Also, Barrette was taking the insurance company’s word about the cost of a replacement policy. Writing for BillMoyers.com, Joshua Holland ran her numbers through Kaiser Permanente’s subsidy calculator. With assistance from Obamacare, she can have a real policy covering preventive care and hospitalization for an out-of-pocket cost of $97 monthly, or a more generous “Silver” level plan for $209.
Now she calls it “a blessing in disguise.”
In short, CBS News couldn’t have gotten the story more backward had they tried. For its part, NBC News featured Los Angeles real estate agent Deborah Cavallaro, whose similar experience led her to conclude that “there’s nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.”
However, LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik found that Cavallaro had simply failed to consult Covered California, the state’s health plan exchange. When he did so, he quickly found that “better plans than she has now are available for her to purchase today, some of them for less money.”
No doubt some among the three to five percent of Americans whose individual health care policies have been cancelled are experiencing genuine sticker shock. However, nobody should take his insurance company’s word at face value without double-checking—a task admittedly made harder by Healthcare.gov’s website meltdown.
See, when you read a story about a couple like Dean and Mary Lou Griffin of Chadd’s Ford, PA, who told the Associated Press they’d expected to be able to keep the policy they bought three years ago, what reporters aren’t asking is where they’d gotten that idea.
From President Obama? Possibly.
More likely, however, from an insurance broker. See, all providers have known about new coverage standards ever since the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010. Since then some have clearly been “churning” the market, offering low-risk, healthy customers bargain policies they knew perfectly well would no longer pass muster come January 1, 2014.
So now come the inevitable cancellation letters, and guess what? If they were lucky—and health-wise the Griffins have been fortunate—here comes the bad news. “We’re buying insurance that we will never use and can’t possibly ever benefit from,” Dean Griffin complains. “We’re basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance.”
Two thoughts: One, don’t get cocky, you never know.
Two, boo-hoo-hoo. You can afford it.
Meanwhile, Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo has documented companies sending “misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into…more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces.” Authorities in four states have disciplined Humana affiliates for exactly that.
It’s a classic bait and switch: luring customers with unsustainably low rates, and then blaming the White House for their chicanery.
That’s basically why we needed Obamacare to begin with.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 6, 2013
“Sanctifying Defenders Of The Status Quo”: The GOP’s Obsession With Rate Shock Victims
Last week, the Obamacare war room detected a twist in the national narrative that concerned them. The media’s obsessive focus on the failed website launch was beginning to give way to stories about individuals who found higher-than-expected prices on the exchanges. A memo instructed participants to prepare for such “media inquiries”: “The media attention will follow individuals to plan selection and their ultimate choices; and, in some cases, there will be fewer options than would be desired to promote consumer choice and an ideal shopping experience,” warned the memo. “Additionally, in some cases there will be relatively high-cost plans.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper obtained the memo. Here is how he described it: “Officials expressed concern that the next shoe to drop in the evolving story about the Affordable Care Act would be disappointment from consumers once they are able to get on the troubled Healthcare.gov website — disappointment because of sticker shock and limited choice.” Notice the crucial difference in framing. The memo simply acknowledged that in some cases — a caveat that appeared twice — consumers would have fewer options and higher prices than the administration would like. In CNN’s characterization, the caveat disappears altogether. Tapper portrays the problem as “disappointment from consumers,” writ large. The minority facing sticker shock has become a stand-in for the entire public.
This turns out to be a synecdoche for the entire Obamacare narrative now. The world of the Republican Party’s fever dreams has sprung to life in the mainstream media, where the Affordable Care Act now exists primarily as a series of cruel, oppressive acts of theft against innocent Americans. Here are CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post chronicling the parade of horribles.
The stories often turn out to be either more complicated than initially depicted, or wildly overblown. But it is surely true that some people will find themselves worse off, at least immediately, under the new law. That their fate has blotted out everything else about the law explains why health-care reform is so maddeningly difficult to enact in the first place.
Everybody knows about the two main ways in which the American health-care system is awful: It’s the most expensive in the world, by far, and also the only advanced health-care system that denies basic care to many citizens. There’s also a third awful trait as well: The system is resistant to change. The very insecurity of American health care, the ever-present fear of finding one’s insurance lifeline snapped and plunging into the howling void of the 50 million uninsured, renders those with insurance understandably terrified of change.
The Affordable Care Act worked around the inherent change aversion of the system by leaving the vast majority of it in place. Insuring tens of millions of Americans costs money, and that money has to come from somewhere, but the law’s author’s carefully apportioned the burden in a relatively painless way. Some of the money comes from higher taxes on the rich — a source of anger and resentment on the right, though conservatives have shrewdly recognized that complaining about higher taxes on wealthy investors to pay for covering the uninsured is not a winning message. Some of it comes from reshuffling Medicare spending, so that the government essentially shifts funds from reimbursing hospitals for treating uninsured patients in emergency rooms to basic medical care, a clear positive-sum transfer.
And, yes, some of the cost is borne by the minority of healthy individuals paying higher premiums. (These individuals will, of course, go from Obamacare victims to Obamacare beneficiaries the moment anybody in their household develops a serious medical condition, in the same manner that fire insurance is a bad deal for people whose houses don’t burn.)
Why has their plight attained such singular prominence? Several factors have come together. The news media has a natural attraction to bad news over good. “Millions Set to Gain Low-Cost Insurance” is a less attractive story than “Florida Woman Facing Higher Costs.” Obama overstated the case when he repeatedly assured Americans that nobody would lose their current health-care plan. There’s also an economic bias at work. Victims of rate shock are middle-class, and their travails, in general, tend to attract far more lavish coverage than the problems of the poor. (Did you know that on November 1, millions of Americans suffered painful cuts to nutritional assistance? Not a single Sunday-morning talk-show mentioned it.)
The point here is not that Obamacare represents a perfectly optimal restructuring of the health-care system. Almost nobody would regard it as such. The point is that it represents the least-disruptive, least-painful way to clear the minimal threshold of any humane reform. The preferred alternatives of both right and left would impose an order of magnitude of more dislocation — creating not a few million “victims,” but tens of millions. What’s on display at the moment is a way of looking at the world that sanctifies defenders of the horrendous status quo and places all the burden upon those trying to change it.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 5, 2013
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