Health Care

New York Times food writer (and food scold) Mark Bittman made the front of the Sunday Review with his latest modest proposal, the 2,100-word “Bad Food? Tax It.” (In a March 29 column, Bittman self-righteously announced a fast on behalf of the poor against proposed G.O.P. budget cuts: “These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts -- they’d barely make a dent -- will quite literally cause more…

On July 3, 1999, The New York Times exposed Al Gore for lying about his family in a national convention speech as vice president of the United States. In 1996, Gore had moved the Democrats to tears by claiming that when his sister Nancy died of cancer in 1984, he vowed then and there to oppose the tobacco industry. How courageous – and completely untrue. The Times found Gore campaigned in 1988…

On Tuesday's Morning Edition, NPR's Julie Rovner spun the debate over a proposed mandate for private insurance companies to cover birth control without a copay as being between "women's health groups," which were not given an ideological label, and organizations such as the Family Research Council, which she clearly identified as "conservative." A representative from her example of a "women's…

Is this, sadly, going to be the second campaign in a row where the so-called mainstream media will make a fetish of fact-checking the Republican candidates while ignoring the misstatements and gaffes of the Democratic candidates — of which there is now just one, President Barack Obama? Last week, as both Newsbusters and the MRC documented, the New York Times (Kevin Sack) published a lengthy…

As Clay Waters at the Media Research Center's Times Watch reported earlier today ("One of Obama's Emotional Arguments for Obama-Care Proven Wrong in NYT Staffer's New Book"), the New York Times's Kevin Sack ran a story yesterday which "reflects badly on Barack Obama and how he misled people in his campaign for Obama-care." I'll say. As reported by Sack (bolds are mine throughout this post):

A rising chorus of repeal-mongers, outraged at the Obama administration's federal health care power grab, took over Washington this week. Nope, it's not the tea party. It's Democrats Against the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). Yes, Democrats. What's IPAB? A Beltway acronym for subverting the deliberative process.

On Monday's Early Show, CBS's Susan Koeppen profiled a doctor who hyped that "people are dying because they don't have simple access" to health care and spotlighted two of his patients who chronicled their difficulties with the Medicaid and Medicare programs. Koeppen also failed to mention the liberal leanings of an organization she labeled as merely "an advocacy group for health care consumers…

In the run-up to the passage of Obamacare in March 2010, Nancy Pelosi infamously told a friendly audience: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Fifteen months later, we still haven't learned everything about a bill which no honest congressperson or senator can claim to have read and fully understood. Today's "discovery" is that some couples in their early 60s…

On June 9, unarmed Gaston County, North Carolina man James Verone held up a bank demanding the sum of $1. After getting the cash from a teller, he patiently waited in the bank for cops to arrive. Twelve days later, MSNBC has picked up on the story as an example of the desperate straits that unemployed, uninsured persons will go for health care. Yet neither anchor Chris Jansing in the 10 a.m…

While grilling former Pennsylvania Senator and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum on NBC's Sunday Meet the Press, host David Gregory was skeptical of the idea that Americans should be able to choose their own health care plan: "They're better off with the freedom that they've got in the vagaries of the private insurance market?" Gregory was responding to Santorum's criticism of ObamaCare: "[…

The next time someone in the media wants to blame budget cutters for premature deaths, remember James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal, who unveiled another story filed under “Great Moments in Socialized Medicine,” once again from jolly old England and the London Daily Mail: Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away. In a final act of…

On Thursday's Early Show, CBS's Seth Doane and Chris Wragge lauded playwright Larry Kramer and his "brilliantly done...and very good" play, "The Normal Heart," while glossing over his long history of radical homosexual activism. Kramer once denigrated former President Ronald Reagan as "Adolf Reagan" and even went so far to call for "Nuremberg trials" to try not only Reagan, but even the top…

Dennis Cauchon at USA Today has been one of a very few establishment press reporters willing to expose federal workers' disproportionate pay and benefits (previous examples here and here) as well as Uncle Sam's precariously dangerous financial situation. Cauchon has two USAT items today on the latter topic (HT to NB commenter Gary Hall): "U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions,"…

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The extinct political slogan "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," may be supplanted by what is happening in the United Kingdom. There is a form of functional political illiteracy here that does not bode well for the United States should it follow Britain's very bad example, particularly on matters involving immigration and health care. For several years, the…