Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   8/18/2015

        Agenda-driven information

It might surprise you to find out that the broadcast, cable (Fox excepted), AP and large city print reporting on news often contains biases that render the reporting into a regurgitation of spin from the White House and Democrat partisans. Committed advocates and cheerleaders on the left usually consider such spin to be simply “correct” story lines and emphasis.

“What happens when the news media catch the White House in a demonstrable lie? That depends entirely on whether they like the administration. If they loathe the administration, it’s front-page news. If they like it, they spike the story…That is exactly what the national media have done to an important story about the White House’s intimate working relationship with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who helped craft the Affordable Care Act.

“You may remember Gruber from his infamous videotapes, the ones in which he called the American public too stupid to understand the law. He added that their stupidity was helpful to Obama, Pelosi and Reid in passing the law.” (From “Spike It! When the Media Kill a Story for Political Reasons,” Professor Charles Lipson, University of Chicago, 6/23)

As often happens in these instances of embarrassing candor, the knee-jerk response of the White House is to say anything that refutes what the eyes see and the ears hear. In common parlance, that’s called “making things up.” In Gruber’s case—from Emperor Obama, his spokesman, Nancy Pelosi and the usual media lapdogs—we heard: Gruber wasn’t employed by the White House and played no important role in drafting the law.

Lipson: “They vaguely remembered somebody named Gruber or Goober or something but, fortunately, he played only a marginal role in health care. Thanks for asking. Next question? How do we know about Gruber’s role? Not because the White House released any documents, not because the media dug into it, but because the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, got MIT to turn over the relevant emails.”

During the crucial months when the bill was being crafted and passed, Gruber’s email communication included 20,000 pages of messages back-and-forth between Gruber and the White House. At the time of the initial Gruber videos, Obama’s obfuscations, and media complicity, there was plenty of corroboration from Gruber himself—exposed by conservatives—about meetings that included Obama.

Obama was intrigued by, and consented to, using misrepresentations of the taxing aspects to rig the OMB scoring of the Affordable Care Act as revenue neutral, with no new middle-class taxes. Gruber provided a key false narrative, that Obama latched onto, which helped Obamacare pass due to a massive, budgetary lie.

Hence, the Wall Street Journal included the Oversight Committee’s acquisition of Gruber’s emails in a major story. The key points were “that Gruber was deeply involved in crafting the health care law, he worked closely with the White House, and, when he became a political liability, the president and his senior aides simply lied about it.” From the rest of the Fourth Estate? Pretty much crickets—effectively, radio silence.

A revealing footnote occurred on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” when Mark Halperin, co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and former top reporter for Time, apologized to his Republican sources and admitted that the White House and Obama lied. Correction: he said, “I think they were not fully forthcoming.” That bit of circumlocution became a source of chuckling by the show’s Democrat stalwarts, including Howard Dean, who laughed and repeated, “not fully forthcoming, not fully forthcoming…” Apparently, the joke’s on us.

The news media have been complicit in misinforming Americans about the economic decline and employment doldrums under Obama. For example, in a report on the economy, the AP acknowledged sluggish pay, lack of full-time jobs and the reduced portion of Americans holding, or even looking for, a job. However, “the Associated Press brushed off two crucial factors: Mass immigration and Obamacare’s grip on employers” (Katie McHughs). The AP used words like “healthy” and the “new normal.”

As was predicted when it passed, Obamacare imposes enormous costs on employers; first, by mandating health coverage for employees who work over 30 hours, and second, by applying that mandate to employers with over 100 workers. Those are clear disincentives to hire full-time people. “Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan Chase, says this could account for as much as one-third of the increase in part-time jobs.”

Obamacare’s employer mandate forces at least 3.3 million Americans to work less than 30 hours per week for wages stagnating thanks to unchecked immigration. Had the Supreme Court sided against the Obama administration’s law in King v. Burwell, these workers would have been allowed to earn more money, and roughly 1.27 million more would have entered the job market.

News media outlets, keen to retain political favor, devote precious little effort to informing people of such inconvenient truths. “But the Associated Press is here to make soothing noises at readers, and tell them the shrinking new economy is just as good as it was before.”

            Next week: how legal and illegal immigration has been holding wages down, and how non native-born workers have fared better than native-born Americans.