The Washington Post says “accused of.”
In the prime-time debut last night for a new president and a press corps frequently accused of being too enamored of him, President Obama faced journalistic skepticism from the opening question.
It could have simply said: “In the prime-time debut last night, President Obama faced journalistic skepticism from a press corps that has been much enamored of him.” But no, it doesn’t take at face value the many statements by others that the news media have been giddy in their support of him.
Contrast that with this statement from ABC news reporters Jonathan Karl and Z. Byron Wolf (which I mentioned in the last post):
The Senate voted 61-36 today to close debate and move forward with a gargantuan stimulus package meant to kick-start the moribund economy with $838 billion in one-time spending and tax credits.
They could instead have said, “The Senate voted to close debate and move forward with a gargantuan stimulus package that the Obama administration claims is meant to kick-start the moribund economy…”. That would have been reporting the facts. But no, they took at face value the claims that this bill is about the economy.
If those claims were true, how would we then explain this description of what’s in the stimulus bill, by Betsy McCaughey at Bloomberg:
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.
New Penalties
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
Some stimulus. Here it’s at best about saving instead of the spending that is supposedly needed to kickstart the economy. (Never mind the question of whether savings can really be achieved by top-down, one-size-fits-all controls from federal bureaucrats.) If ABC reporters Karl and Wolf had done their homework and had taken items like this into consideration, they would not have accepted at face value the notion that the bill is about economic stimulus.