Time Magazine editor-at-large Mark Halperin appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” Thursday. Guest host Laura Ingraham pressed Halperin, one of the tippy-top members of the elite media, to explain why he and his colleagues refused to scrutinize ObamaCare for three years or take Republican warnings (all of which are proving true) seriously.
To his credit, Halperin didn’t dodge the fact that the media failed to do its job. He did, though, rather bizarrely blame Mitt Romney and Republicans for it.
Laura, there is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program at the time of passage and during the context of the president’s re-election. Any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand. As we write in “Double Down,” the problem for the Republicans in the re-election context was you nominated, Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a guy who was not very well positioned, to say the least, to make the case against Obamacare because he passed the healthcare plan in Massachusetts. …
Barack Obama knew he wasn’t going to run for re-election defending the program. Part of the flaws of the way the media works. If the candidates aren’t talking about it gets less coverage. No doubt a disservice was done to the country and to liberals. It didn’t get scrutiny on passage and then again when the president was running for re-election. Our cover story in the magazine lays all this out just how deep the president’s predicament is now politically and substantively.
One wonders how many moons Halperin can see from his planet.
Romney did hit on ObamaCare, once during the most high-profile of all presidential election events — a presidential debate. But he was immediately pummeled by elite media fact-checkers.
In fact, the media played whack-a-mole with Romney, repeatedly hitting him again and again and again whenever he dared criticize ObamaCare. By loudly screaming liar! every time he brought it up, the media intentionally turned ObamaCare into a liability for Romney to run on. And you can bet that was the plan.
According to Halperin, just how many times did Romney have to bring up ObamaCare in order for the media to do its job? Was he just one mention away? Two? Four?
Regardless, the biggest election of the last three years without Romney’s name on the ticket was Republican Scott Brown’s January 2010 Senate win in Massachusetts — a startling upset caused almost completely by the public’s growing concern over ObamaCare.
Still, the media did not scrutinize.
It is also nonsense that Republicans as a whole didn’t make an election issue of ObamaCare. Dozens of Republican lawmakers ran on ObamaCare in 2010. Their victories were historic.
Still, the media chose not to scrutinize.
But there is just no excuse — other than bias — for the media not scrutinizing ObamaCare as it was being proposed, written, and passed. Still, throughout all of that, including a grueling legislative process, the media refused to investigate the legislation or to take New Media’s reporting seriously.
In many cases, over the last few years, the media pushed back against ObamaCare critics as motivated by race.
No, what happened here, and we all know it, including Halperin, is that the media wanted ObamaCare to pass and wanted Obama to win re-election.
It was a cover-up, plain and simple, and it is one that continues to this day. The ObamaCare train wreck of cancellations is just beginning. The media knows this but still they refuse to report on it.
Maybe if we got Mitt Romney to talk about it…
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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