Last week when President Barack Obama cited an impossible "three
thousand percent" price reduction and referred to a woman who "upped her
deductible...to the minimum," ABC's World News didn't utter a syllable
about it, but in a Friday story on Sarah Palin headlining a John McCain
campaign event in Arizona, ABC's David Wright found it somehow
newsworthy to remind viewers Palin made verbal miscues in 2008 - as if
those are what doomed McCain's presidential campaign.
Noting that McCain plucked Palin "pretty much out of obscurity in the
frozen tundra," but now she "has all but eclipsed" McCain in national
popularity, Wright played a soundbite of Time's Mark Halperin observing
"John McCain needs her now to come back and help him just as he helped
her by raising her from obscurity." Wright gratuitously asserted:
"Never mind that at key moments in the '08 campaign Palin lost her
footing." Viewers then saw a clip of Palin on the CBS Evening News
in 2008: "Our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the
state that I am the executive of."
Of course, Palin, unlike Obama last week, was factually accurate -
even if she did stumble in her second sentence - since Alaska borders
Russia and Canada. Wright moved on: "Today, all of that was ancient
history..."
In his Monday, March 15 rally in Ohio for his health care takeover,
Obama maintained: "Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums
fall by as much as three thousand percent, which means they could give
you a raise." Unless the cost will become a payment from the insurance
companies to the empoloyers, it's impossible for the price of something
to fall by more than 100 percent, since a 100 percent cut in a cost
would price it at zero.
He also asserted: "And she upped her deductible last year to the
minimum, the highest possible deductible."
Disinterest in Obama's gaffes is nothing new, hence the lack of media
pick up for his "I've now been in 57 states" claim in early 2008. See a
May 28, 2008 MRC CyberAlert: "Scant Media Attention for a Litany of Gaffes by Barack
Obama [1]."
From the Friday, March 26 World News on ABC:
MARK HALPERIN, TIME MAGAZINE: John McCain and Sarah Palin are now a political husband and wife. They're joined together for better or for worse and John McCain needs her now to come back and help him just as he helped her by raising her from obscurity.
DAVID WRIGHT: Never mind that at key moments in the '08 campaign Palin lost her footing.
SARAH PALIN, ON CBS IN 2008: Our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of.
WRIGHT: Today, all of that was ancient history...
But apparently not "ancient" to ABC News and David Wright.
- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at
the Media Research Center. Click
here [2] to follow him on Twitter.