Ceci Connolly

It's probably safe to assume that a lot of reporters in the mainstream media lean to the left side of the ideological spectrum. And it was seen throughout the health care debate over the past year and a half - that somehow we need to raise the rhetoric beyond hyperbole like death panels, etc.

One of those reporters was The Washington Post's health care reporter Ceci Connolly, who last summer appeared on MSNBC and made such a plea. And since then, she made other gestures to show she was in line with the Obama administration on this issue. Well, lo and behold, according to a story by Jeremy Peters posted on the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Connolly canceled an appearance at a party for the book, "Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What it Means for All of Us," which according to her Web site Connolly and her book are labeled as "one of the main authors of the first definitive book on the 2010 health care law."

"[T]he Post found itself in another potentially embarrassing and ethically compromised position on Wednesday after one of its most senior reporters abruptly canceled an appearance at her own book party, which was being sponsored by a public relations firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party," Peters wrote.

Washington Post health care reporter Ceci Connolly appeared on PBS's Tavis Smiley show on Wednesday, plugging the Post's new account of the battle, titled "Landmark" -- and suggesting the media was scatter-brained, and really needed President Obama to reel the country back in:  

But when it came to the proposed solutions that's where it started getting complicated, and the White House, if you especially think back, Tavis, to last summer, just about a year or so now, a year ago, June, July and into that really rough August of '09 period, that's when the White House lost control of the message.

Part of the reason that it did was they let reporters like me write endlessly about the inside-Congress -- really minutia -- tedious process kind of story, and it took President Obama coming back and reengaging in September of '09 with that joint address to Congress which was really a speech to the whole nation to kind of get it back on track a little bit.

Who says a little engineering mixed in with your journalism is a bad thing? At least one MSNBC host and Washington Post reporter said it's a journalist's job to focus on "real issues" in the hotly debated issue of health care reform.

This was the topic of discussion in a panel featuring John Rother, executive vice president of Policy and Strategy for AARP, Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity and host Dr. Nancy Snyderman during MSNBC's "Dr. Nancy" Aug. 10.

Rother argued there has been far too much hyperbole on the issue, which he insisted was meant to mislead the public.

The New York Times and the Washington Post had a pretty profound disagreement this morning on whether or not Obama has a chance to get a health care "reform" proposal through Congress this year, with the Times, predictably, being far more optimistic about prospects for the president's big-government health plan.

Times health care reporter Kevin Sack portrayed Obama-style health care "reform" as having serious momentum in the lead two paragraphs of his Friday article, "Health Care Reform's Moment Arrives (Again)."

In their heart of hearts, few in the Obama administration would have predicted late last year that they would be this well positioned by June to achieve a major victory on health care. As the economy faltered, and attention focused on Wall Street and Detroit, it seemed unthinkable that Congress would be ready to devote the summer of 2009 to the costly proposition of providing health coverage for all, a goal that has eluded presidents since Theodore Roosevelt.

But five months after the inauguration, health care dominates the domestic agenda on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Any package that emerges will preserve the country's private insurance system, at least for now. It could nonetheless bring sweeping changes, requiring that everyone be insured, creating a government health plan to compete with commercial carriers and perhaps taxing employer-provided health benefits.

By contrast, the top two paragraphs of Ceci Connolly's lead story in Friday's Washington Post seem to have come from an alternate universe:

Former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle (picture at right is part of a Getty Images pic at a related New York Times story) has just upped the ante in Washington's tax-avoiding/evading game of "Can you top this?"

Whereas recently confirmed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "only" $40,000 in back taxes and interest, principally relating to unpaid Social Security and Medicare taxes (with a dash of retirement-plan penalty and illegally deducted overnight summer camp expenses included in the mix), the man who Rush Limbaugh used to call "Puff" Daschle during his Senate days has upped to ante to six figures.

Jake Tapper at ABC's Political Punch appears to be the one breaking the story (HT NRO's The Corner):

Bumps in the Road: Obama's HHS Secretary Nominee Faces Tax Questions Over Car and Driver

Thacker, who is HIV-positive himself, had merely written on his Website that health authorities and journalists had used the term "gay plague" during the early 1980s. Amid a media firestorm, he withdrew his nomination the next day.

Fast forward to Connolly's lede in the August 7, A-2 story "Early Lessons Forgotten, AIDS Conference Told," on the International AIDS Conference's finding that HIV/AIDS is skyrocketing largely because of homosexual sex. Connolly describes AIDS in a similar way to how Thacker put it:

A telephone tipster made a very interesting point to us today about The Washington Post. In the midst of their coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith case, and a Vermont campaign-finance limit case, the Post found no room Wednesday for the pro-life win in NOW v. Scheidler. (That's the case where NOW tried to have clinic protesters charged under a mob-racketeering statute.) The Post could argue that the case is a bit of a rerun: the court dismissed it in 2003, only to have a federal judge keep the case alive like a zombie. But the court ruled 8 to 0 and the feminists were routed in the opinion by none other than liberal Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer. USA Today published a fairly prominent, thorough piece Wednesday on Page A-4.