It has come to this.*
Poor Ashleigh and Brianna are just SO confused about it all!
What should have been, indeed what was obligated to be a professional, objective and clarifying report on the President’s revealed Obamacare lie of three year’s duration became an ugly exhibition of news media government collaboration and shameless incompetence, perhaps the most unprofessional I have ever seen.
From the transcript of CNN Newsroom on November 5 at 9:33 a.m. EDT: Brianna Keilar, CNN White House correspondent, is reporting on the controversy over the reality that what President Obama assured Americans would be the case regarding their health care plans was not how his health care law actually worked.
KEILAR : Good morning. Basically in the face that that promise could not be kept ultimately [ COMMENT: Ethics Breaches #1 and #2. This is horrible, biased, misleading journalism. Obama didn’t make a promise, he made a guarantee: he said what would happen, based om what the law he period. A broken promise implies a present intent to keep a promise that is later broken. That is not what the President’s statements about the ACA were. They were authoritative assertions, intended to be taken as truth. “Could not be kept” suggests that the failure of the ACA to meet the conditions the President attached to it was beyond his control. This is a lie, or incompetent reporting. It certainly could be kept: the Democratic Senate defeated proposed measures that would have ensured that it was kept. The law’s effect of forcing insurance companies to cancel insurance plans that the policy holders liked was intentional, and well within the President’s control. CNN is a news organization, and is not supposed to be dealing in spin and euphemisms. Yet that is what Keilar privided here.] , and that it just wasn’t as simple from that, we’ve heard from President Obama last night at an OFA event – that’s his former campaign apparatus which is now a non-profit advocacy group which is working on ObamaCare and promoting it – President Obama spoke at an OFA event and here was the change that he made:
PRESIDENT OBAMA (Video Clip): If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, and we said you could keep it, if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.
[ COMMENT: Ethics Breach #3. You can’t make a “change,” after the fact, in what you have already said regarding something that has occurred, so that the prospective statement made in the past is now more accurate and less misleading. Keilar, who is an embarrassment, acts as if this is just a standard practice: announce that what you said years ago is now something else. She is obligated to illuminate what has transpired, which is audaciously dishonest, not aid and abet the President’s outrageous deception.]
BANFIELD: You have heard this one over and over again. Right? If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. Last night, though, hmm, that presidential promise got a wee bit of a tweak.
[ COMMENT: Ethics Breach #4. Now Banfield reinforces both obfuscations at once, repeating them so they will stick. That “promise” got a “tweak”—but again, it wasn’t a promise in the first place, and after it has been demonstrated that the authoritative assertion was false, the speaker cannot go back in time and “tweak” it so it is more consistent with what everyone now knows is the real truth. Nor was this a “tweak,’ a word intentionally chosen to imply triviality. To the contrary, the retroactive alteration was material to the original statement: a revision, not a “tweak,”]
BANFIELD: Our senior White House correspondent Brianna Keilar is live at the White House. Some might say it’s a bit of semantics.
[ COMMENT: Ethics Breach #5. WHAT? “Some say”…who says changing the specifics of a past statement that was false so it will suddenly seem true to idiots and time travelers is “semantics”? It’s called deception, and it is the news media’s job to report the truth, not aid in obfuscation.]
But you know what, Brianna? That tweak is really loud, and it’s echoing across the country right now. [COMMENT: WHAT??? What is a “loud tweak”? This is the communications business, and CNN’s anchor is talking incomprehensible gibberish…all the better to confuse the audience.]
BANFIELD: When you think back over the last few years to the number of appearances and speeches that have been given that have been so emphatic, you’ve got to wonder, how could anyone not have known that there would be this strange grandfathering problem? Have a listen real quickly, Brianna, to the way it’s been depicted for the last few years. It’s like they didn’t know the grandfathering was actually step-grandfathering. How did that big detail get missed?[ COMMENT: Ethics Breach #6. This exchange now resembles a raunchy comedy film with Banfield—who is capable of better—playing some stereotype blonde bimbo who just can’t understand the obvious—like Pamela Anderson shaking Jenny McCarthy’s severed head in “Scary Movie 3” and shouting, “Are you all right?” “Well, geeee, Briana! How could they keep saying this and ignoring that weird grandfathering thingee? Like, I just don’t get it!” “They” wrote the damn law, you silly, biased, incompetent hack–it was “their” legislation! “They”—that is HE, the President of the U.S.—could make sure it was exactly as he wanted to be, or he could simply not sign it until the law met his requirements. His party’s Senate passed the “step-grandfathering,” and it was his law start to finish. How could he not know? You are answering your own question, and don’t realize it, because you are either in denial or part of a cover-up: He had to know! We have been told that he did know! And yet..Ooooh! “How did that big detail get missed?” This is junior high journalism. Weep, America.]
[Now comes conservative Will Cain into the discussion, and he shows signs of brain meltage from the idiocy and obfuscation surrounding him…]
CAIN: The conversation you had with Brianna a little earlier, you talked about how could they not have known? How could they not have known about this grandfathering provision that makes the President’s statement “If you like your health care plan you can keep it. Period,” makes it false? They did know. It was not a mistake. It was a lie. You cannot portray this in any other way. It was a lie. It was intended –
[COMMENT: Correction, Will: they cannot portray it any other way if they are capable of or dedicated to providing honest and objective journalism, and not partisan cover. For now Banfield, as surely as if she were a paid White House flack, rallies to the cause:]
BANFIELD: That’s pretty strident language to say it was a lie.
CAIN: But it’s true.
[ COMMENT: Ah, poor, gullible Will! What does truth have to do with news analysis when the primary objective is to show that a calculated Presidential lie to pass major legislation that the public would have rejected if they knew what was happening never really occurred?]
BANFIELD: How do you know that? [COMMENT: Ethics Breach #7: An easy question to answer, but an unethical, incompetent, dishonest one to ask, and such a shocking question from an alleged journalist that Cain is rendered almost as inept as the CNN duo. HOW? The President and his allies were writing the law, and he was going to sign the finished product. The law was over 2000 pages long and literally incomprehensible for any normal citizen: the public relied on their President, who was elected on the assurance that he would make transparency his watchword, to tell them how the law would affect them. He had complete power to make the law conform to his words, and for most of the three and a half years he kept repeating his false description of the law, he knew exactly what was in it (or, if he didn’t, he imposed a massive piece of life altering legislation without knowing what it was, which if not worse than lying about it, is just as unethical, and even more frightening.]
CAIN: Because it was put in place for two reasons. Two calculated reasons they needed. Number one, it was designed to destroy the individual health care market because they needed those people to go into the ObamaCare Healthcare.gov exchanges. Why did they need people to go in there? Number one, they thought it was better. They thought ObamaCare provided better plans than those that were available on the individual market. Two, they needed those young healthy people, those people that are not sick, that do not have pre-existing conditions to go in, to offset the problems —
BANFIELD: I hear all that. You know what, Will? I hear all that. But for you to say – for you to say – maybe I’m a bit of a Pollyanna. But I don’t like to suggest that plans are launched with lies.
[COMMENT: Ethics Breach #8, and the grand finale of a journalistic tragedy. Ashleigh Banfield has just announced that she just doesn’t like being a journalist where Barack Obama is concerned, and darn it, maybe she’s just being a little girl about it rather than an objective grown-up professional, but it just makes her uncomfortable to tell the truth and be clear about what is happening and why—her professional and ethical duty as ajournalist—so she just won’t, that’s all, and she’s not going to allow a guest do it either.]
A real news organization would fire her today. The plan was launched with lies. This was obvious to many of us from the beginning, but now that the facts are clear and indisputable, a competent, honest, objective and professional news media, even though it was flagrantly rooting for this President and his policies as the drama unfolded, has no ethical choice now but to illuminate the truth to the American public. Yet it cannot muster the integrity, honesty, competence and patriotism to do so.
And that’s an American tragedy.
* Note to readers: I am painfully aware that Ethics Alarms has had an over-abundance of posts on this topic of late. But what is unfolding is a dual ethics train wreck of great ethical and historical importance. The news media is being given the opportunity to demonstrate that it can report the news with objectivity and neutrality now that the folly of its blatant partisanship and news manipulation on behalf of a leader who has proven himself unworthy of it (not that any leader should be so supported by journalists, no matter how competent, trustworthy or virtuous). In its failure, the corruption, incompetence and adamant bias of the news media is coming into sharp focus. Since there are a great many who have an interest in seeing to it that this is missed by the public, I believe I have an obligation to keep presenting the evidence, which is overwhelming, and depressing. It is not fun, and there are many topics I would prefer to think about.
__________________________
Graphic: Hotflix
Ethics Alarms 
It is sad, but this doesn’t change anything. Anyone with an open mind has known about the bias and corruption in the media for a long time. Any objective person realized that Sarah Palin was more qualified to be President than Barack Obama (and that is a scary thought). It doesn’t matter. The supporters of the left long ago abandoned rational thought for passionate ideology. None of the Obama supporters I know have been moved at all by any of this. They merely believe that all the problems are caused by Republicans not going along with what the President wants like they feel they should. They insist there is no liberal bias in the media. Why should they? What we are seeing now is exactly the same thing that has been going on for decades. If they admit there is bias now, they have to admit that they were wrong when they denied the bias in 2005, in 2000, in 1995… The media has been this way for most people’s entire lives. They and the schools have all denied this bias their entire lives. They have been told that the only biased news is the laughingstock called FOX, so the only example of what news is supposed to be is the liberal-biased news. There is no way for them to ever see the truth and nothing you can say will change that.
I know a lot of very intelligent, liberal Democrats and they are loyal to Obama and the Democratic party, no matter what happens. They will rationalize anything bad that happens as due to Republican interference and any bad news as fabricated by Fox news. They will rationalize that any lie was ‘for the greater good’ of getting their programs passed, they will rationalize any unintended consequences as ‘to make an omelette., you have to break some eggs’. They believe what they are told by the people they have always been told to believe. The only way they can break out of the cycle is to admit that everything they have known is a lie and everyone they have believed in their entire life has been a fraud.
Dogma was once defined as “certainty without knowledge”. We are seeing the power of dogma, the power of orthodoxy, and the power of propaganda.
Are there not Obama opponents with the same level of intellectual honesty?
If so, why are they not as powerful?
“There is no way for them to ever see the truth and there is nothing you can say to change that.”
Wrong. Jack has pointed out several topics which made me more curious… which made me do some of my own digging around on these topics…and in many cases it has caused me to change my mind. Keep writing, Jack.
Mind if I ask where you are from, Sharon? Who your Congress person is, and your senators?
Where am I from? Oh hell…are you going to cuss me out?
These intelligent people in the media are not perpetuating a lie. They are true believers. They believe they are just spreading the word and doing what must be done for the good of the country. They don’t believe that President Obama lied. They rationalize it away and defend it. If they can’t see what is going on, what are the chances everyone else will?
Exactly. This is why zealotry scares me. You can call out a liar, or embarass them, or shame them, or catch them. A true believer will NEVER give up, roll over, or stand down. They convince themselves that the other side isn’t just wrong but is EVIL, so whatever it takes to justify the good guys is OK.
Thanks. That means more to me than anything else you could say.
Who cares at this point. Let istall burn!
Full implementation of the law, zero exemptions, zero delays. Every single word gets forced into action.
The people voted in a Senate and re-elected a man-child to the white house, knowing they would never do anything about this pile of failure, so I say we shove it down their throats.
Let’s all watch it burn together…
Ashley was spinning the facts during the George Zimmerman trial like you wouldn’t believe.
She looked like a complete and utter idiot.
This is just a matter of CNN living up to its reputation. Sophomoric journalism. As long as there are people who are willing to accept blatant lies and obfuscations as a part of their limited goals in life, there will be criminal politicians and journalists willing to support that criminality. It becomes business as usual. Now, it has reached a point where a president can lie through his nose, repeatedly and with conviction, and not be held accountable. Clinton did it with the Lewinsky case and got away with it. It was only a small step from that to a lie that brought about the legal sequestering of the medical profession, health insurance and 1/6 of the nation’s economy. When lies become an accepted practice, anything is possible.
Jon Stewart did a funny bit on CNN about a week ago — that the journalists dumb everything down to “good thing or bad thing.” They are incapable of competent journalism period. I only watch it if I am stuck in an airport.
“BANFIELD: You have heard this one over and over again. Right? If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. Last night, though, hmm, that presidential promise got a wee bit of a tweak.”
Was that a tweak or a twerk?
Banfield and Keiler apparently were not hired for their impressive journalistic credentials. “Two meatheads”, as Archie Bunker would say.