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Townhall...
New Media Catches
Obama Bribing the Fourth Estate
By Howard Rich
For years, America’s left-leaning mainstream media outlets have
belittled and rebuked members of the new media — questioning their
credibility, impugning their integrity and assigning all manner of
self-serving motivations to their contributions to the marketplace of
ideas.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragic Tucson shooting earlier this
year, the legacy press took it a step further — essentially implying
that the new media was complicit in the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords by virtue of the “climate of hate” it helped create in America.
Obviously, the facts of the Tucson case quickly (and completely)
debunked this theory — but not before a parade of liberal talking heads
had spewed a torrent of reckless vitriol on new media outlets and the
First Amendment freedom they exercise.
Fast-forward three months to April 6, when reporter Matthew Boyle of
The Daily Caller published a report outlining the details of Barack
Obama’s socialized medicine slush fund.
Boyle’s report — like hundreds of investigative pieces published every
day by new media outlets — was in and of itself a rebuke of many of the
criticisms leveled against Internet journalists by the legacy press.
Not only did Boyle accurately relate new primary source material —
including excerpts from public documents and Congressional testimony —
but he also sought, received and published the response of those with
conflicting views regarding this information. On top of that, he
presented the facts sans any editorial commentary.
In other words, Boyle’s investigative report was every bit as “pure”
journalistically as something you would read in The Washington Post or
watch on the CBS Evening News.
Which brings us to the substance of Boyle’s article — the hundreds of
thousands of dollars that The Post and CBS have received from the Early
Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP), an Obamacare slush fund that has
arbitrarily doled out nearly $2 billion to select corporations,
government pension funds and labor unions within the last year.
The very existence of this fund — which has been touted as a means of
protecting health care coverage prior to the onset of Obama’s
unconstitutional socialized medicine law — highlights the dangers
inherent in giving government additional control over the health care
marketplace. Not only is this fund rife with corruption and
mismanagement — as evidenced by these payments to media outlets that
are supposed to objectively cover Obamacare — but its borrowed billions
have failed to accomplish their objective.
For example, last October Minnesota-based 3M announced that it would no
longer offer health insurance to its 23,000 employees thanks to the
passage of Obamacare. Meanwhile Chicago-based Boeing is one of several
large corporations now requiring its employees to pay higher
deductibles and copayments as a result of the new law. So much for
Obama’s repeated promises that no one would lose their coverage and
that health care costs would go down, right?
Yet despite these failures, taxpayers are still subsidizing a
pre-Obamacare bailout — providing grants to artificially prop up
coverage that will eventually be covered by new entitlement spending
(assuming the law isn’t struck down or repealed first).
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has written very little about
ERRP. In fact, a follow-up report on the blog Hot Air revealed that
both The Washington Post and CBS have completely ignored problems with
the slush fund secretly bankrolling health care for its early retirees.
According to Hot Air, a search for ERRP on The Post website last week
revealed nothing. A search for the full name of the slush fund revealed
only one article (a column that referenced a new media report,
ironically). Meanwhile on the CBS website, a search for ERRP also
produced no entries — while a search for the full name of the slush
fund returned only one entry, a link to the Obama administration’s
health care reform website.
“It looks like the Post and CBS aren’t interested in covering the fact
that ERRP was grossly underfunded and wound up failing to protect
existing coverage,” Hot Air noted.
American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox once wrote that “to sin by silence
when we should protest makes cowards of men.”
It apparently makes cowards of the media, too — although a compelling
case could be made that these mainstream outlets were paid for their
silence. Fortunately for taxpayers, the new media was there to uncover
and expose the truth regarding this corruption.
Read it at Townhall
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