NPR's resident ObamaCare booster, Julie Rovner, lionized outgoing liberal Congressman Henry Waxman on Friday's Morning Edition. Rovner trumpeted how "during his 40 years in the House, he focused on passing legislation – lots of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Orphan Drug Act, nutrition labels, food safety, and the Affordable Care Act. Waxman played a major role in all of them."
The correspondent left out any conservative/Republican criticism of the California representative, and let a fellow Democratic member of Congress and two liberal talking heads laud the retiring politician, with one heralding him as the Ted Kennedy of the House. She did include two clips from Orrin Hatch, but the Utah Republican senator heaped praise on Rep. Waxman. Rovner also gave the congressman a chance to take a parting shot at the Tea Party-friendly caucus in Congress:
REP. HENRY WAXMAN, (D), CALIFORNIA: It's very difficult when the [Republican] party that's in control is dominated by a group of extremists from the Tea Party that think along the lines of compromise being a dirty word; and working with the other party – the Democrats – as complicity with the enemy.
Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep set the laudatory tone in his introduction for the NPR journalist's report:
STEVE INSKEEP: At the end of this year, the President will lose a vital ally in the House. He's a member of the Watergate class of 1974. After Republican President Richard Nixon resigned in that year, a huge number of Democrats won election to the House. Some soon lost their seats again; others went on to flashy careers. And then, there's Henry Waxman. The California Democrat stayed and stayed, and, for better or worse, Waxman put his name on one of the longest legislative legacies ever assembled.
Rovner wasted little time before rattling off her list of Waxman's supposed accomplishments. She continued with a soundbite from Brookings Institution's Tom Mann, who likened Rep. Waxman to Kennedy: "Waxman is really one of the Ted Kennedy's of the Congress. Remember, they're both liberals, but both had an uncanny ability to work with other members, when need be, on both sides of the aisle to get things done."
After playing her first clip from the California liberal, where he defended his political ideology, the correspondent introduced her snippets from Senator Hatch by asserting that "what's made Waxman so effective over the years has been that willingness to work across the aisle. One of his frequent partners has been Utah conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch. They first teamed up on major legislation in the early 1980's, on a bill that paved the way for the sale of generic copies of prescription drugs."
Later in the segment, Rovner played the praising clips from Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Families USA's Ron Pollack. While she underlined Waxman's "liberalism" at one point, she never gave ideological labels for these two talking heads. The NPR correspondent also included her soundbite of Waxman's attack on the Tea Party.
Nearly two years earlier, Rovner filed a similarly one-sided report about ObamaCare's controversial mandate for abortifacients, contraception, and sterilizations. She turned to just two talking heads for the segment: Peggy Mastroianni, general counsel at the federal government's own EEOC, an organization which was rebuked in a unanimous Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of houses of worship in hiring and personnel matters; and Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a lawyer for the far-left American Civil Liberties Union, who once worked for the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights.
