While Fox News continues to cater to the extreme fringe of the Republican party, the GOP has increasingly benefited from a network of mainstream media journalists who, being sympathetic with right-wing ideology, have increasingly relinquished their duty as journalists in order to disseminate right-wing talking points. As TalkingPointsMemo has discovered, this has now taken the form of an effort to push the blatantly false assertion that the House health care reform bill will cost 1.5 trillion dollars.
In fact, according to the CBO, the House bill would only cost 1 trillion dollars. As the report clearly states:
According to that assessment, enacting those provisions by themselves would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of $1,042 billion over the 2010–2019 period
However, in the "liberal" media, facts get brushed to the side when there's a GOP agenda to push. The disinformation began with an article by Ron Fournier's AP in which an anonymous source is cited as saying that the bill would cost 1.5 trillion. This anonymous "tip" has since been debunked, but even after the correct number was released, the AP has continued to push this false information with yet another article asserting the same bogus figure.
This, in turn, has prompted several right-wing media outlets to run with the figure, including Mark Halperin's Page and ABC News. The justification here, apparently, is that the Associated Press cannot be wrong and that anonymous rumors take precedence over established facts. One might call it faith-based journalism...
Interestingly enough, however, ABC News directly contradicts itself by stating both the correct figure and Ron Fournier's fabrication. However, as you can probably guess, the actual figure is only mentioned after the bogus one. First, ABC News asserts the following:
Today, the president met separately with Sens. Snowe and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., to discuss health care, while three congressional committees continue discussions on the House Democrats $1.5 billion health overhaul legislation.
Then later:
On Wednesday, the Senate health committee -- one of five committees in Congress mulling a health care reform bill -- approved one version on a party-line vote of 13-10. House Democrats unveiled their $1.04 trillion, 10-year plan for health care reform Tuesday. But it remains to be seen which plan -- if any -- will get passed into law by Congress this year.
Obama, apparently, is meeting with Nelson and Snowe about a nonexistent piece of legislation. Now, normally, such a direct contradiction would seem to suggest simple incompetence on the part of ABC, but this isn't the furthest extent of the article's abuse of the truth.
In addition to the price tag disinformation, it also uses vague language in a transparent attempt to conflate the additional costs that may be taken on by the federal government with overall health care costs. Certainly, the health care bill may very well put an additional burden on the federal budget (though it remains to be seen how much the final bill will cut costs). However, this result is not mutually exclusive with an overall reduction of costs to individual citizens. Such distinctions, however, have no place in ABC's de facto GOP press shop. Specifically making sure to identify the legislation as a "partisan Democratic" bill, ABC's former Ron Paul correspondent Z. Byron Wolf offers the following misleading spin:
As Snowe was meeting with Obama at the White House, health care discussions continued strong on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., slammed assertions that the plans proposed by the president and Congressional Democrats would not save taxpayers and the federal government money in the long haul.
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf said today that the legislation under discussion would in fact raise costs instead of lowering them.
In fact, as Wolf himself reported earlier in a blog post, Elmendorf was only referring to costs that will be taken on by the federal government, but in the process of writing the official story for ABC News, Mr. Wolf decided to distort Elmendorf's claim to include the term "taxpayers," an embellishment that seems to suggest that individual citizens will also face higher health care costs.
Again, however, neither Elmendorf nor anyone else at the CBO has said any such thing. This fact, unfortunately, appears to be yet another casualty in ABC's war on health care coverage.