The press usually doesn’t admit to this sort of thing:
Washington Post columnist Patrick Pexton made a rather startling admission in the paper’s Sunday edition:
The Post never meant for their recent story about how President Obama’s health care law expands the budget deficit to become a viral Internet sensation. In fact, they deliberately tried to bury the story.
Putting the story (inside the paper) on A3 was the right judgment for a print publication. (Story author Lori) Montgomery urged her editors, correctly, not to put it on the front page: it wasn’t worth that.
The story in question was titled “Health care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds.” It pointed out that the administration had double-counted Medicare savings in the law and once you adjusted for that it added to the deficit rather than reducing it, as the White House has claimed. . .
Pexton, the Post’s resident ombudsman . . . admits that they are ambivalent about this success, calling story’s popularity a reflection of our “our reactive, partisan, hyperventilating media culture.”
A study has found that the government’s rigged estimates were rosy by half a trillion dollars, and to the Washington Post, that’s not news.
Pexton tried hard to make the case that the story was worth being buried, arguing that various official reports undermine the independent study, but he’s very selective about the evidence he is willing to admit:
- He quotes the official CBO scoring, without mentioning that the head of the CBO himself criticized the official rules, and that said Obamacare worsens our fiscal outlook.
- He doesn’t mention that the CBO scoring was reverse-engineered by matching ten years of revenue against four years of cost, so merely the passing of time has been sufficient to explode its cost.
- He doesn’t mention that the CBO scoring is obsolete because of the failure of the CLASS act.
- He doesn’t mention that Obamacare’s subsidy costs have risen 30% since the law was enacted.
- He mentions the Medicare Actuary, but unaccountably fails to mention the Medicare Actuary’s finding that Obamacare dramatically underestimates costs, among other criticisms.
Even the official referees say that the CBO score was inaccurate, including the score’s own author. But the Post doesn’t want you to know that.
(Via Instapundit.)
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