Tuesday's CBS This Morning show was an especially disgraceful display of media bias.
Late yesterday morning, NewsBusters' Jeffrey Meyer noted how the show's Nora O'Donnell admitted to throwing "a softball of a question" at Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. The question: “What's going to happen if Republicans take control (of the Senate)?” NB's Scott Whitlock additionally observed that the program "alternated between confusion as to why Barack Obama may be driving Republicans to a big midterm victory and strident declarations that the GOP would have no mandate." Still another item needs to be separately cited: Warren's tired, refuted, but unchallenged assertion that Ebola is the GOP's fault, specifically (bolds are mine throughout this post):
WARREN: Of course. Well, of course, I'm worried. Part of this reminds me, this is why elections matter and why they matter over time. You know, Ebola is not new. We've known about it for a long time. And we were putting money into funding Ebola many years ago. And Republicans have cut funding overall for medical research. For the National Institute of Health and Ebola has not been a priority.
The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler made mince-meat of Warren's claim over a week ago:
The absurd claim that only Republicans are to blame for cuts to Ebola research
Generally, Congress gave the NIH about what the president requested — sometimes more, sometimes less. In 2013, for instance, Congress gave the NIH more than what the White House had requested, but then $1.5 billion was taken away by sequestration.
Whose idea was sequestration? It was originally a White House proposal, designed to force Congress to either swallow painful cuts or boost taxes. The law mandating sequestration passed on a bipartisan vote — and then Republicans embraced it even more strongly when they could not reach a grand budget deal with President Obama.
For fiscal year 2015, the documents show, it was the Obama White House that proposed to cut the NIH’s budget from the previous year. Moreover, we should note that President George W. Bush, a Republican, is responsible for significantly boosting NIH’s funding in the early years of his presidency.
... In the specific case of the NIH branch that deals with infectious diseases, funding jumped from $1.8 billion in 2000 to $4.3 billion in 2004 — but funding has been flat since then. Funding in 2014 was again $4.3 billion. So that’s effectively a cut over time.
... On many levels, this line of attack is absurd.
Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending, and both Democrats and Republicans in recent years have broadly supported efforts to rein in federal spending. Sequestration resulted from a bipartisan agreement. In some years, Congress has allocated more money for NIH and CDC than the Obama administration requested. Meanwhile, contrary to the suggestion of the DCCC ad, there never was a specific vote on funding to prevent Ebola.
There’s no doubt that spending has been cut, or at least failed to keep pace with inflation, but the fingerprints of both parties are on the knives.
Kessler failed to get to another important, which is that NIH and CDC have been particularly adept at wasting money on ridiculous studies and plush appointments.
But, obviously, the truth doesn't matter to the Senator who arguably owes her previous career's professional advancement to a dubious claim of having Indian heritage.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
