Media Matters Daily Summary

Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America, click on the title or 'read more' to read the entirety of each story. SHOCK: House health care bill saves $260,000 per word! Right-wing media have run with the Politico's Jonathan Allen misleading calculation that the House's recently announced health care reform legislation costs "about $2.24 million per word." In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 "would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $104 billion"; therefore, using Allen's formula, the bill would actually save $260,000 per word. Read More Media echo GOP's fixation on size of House health care reform bill Following the release of the House Democrats' health care reform bill, the leaders of the House Republican caucus repeatedly stressed the length and size of the bill during an October 29 press conference. Numerous media figures and outlets have followed in lockstep, with the Politico's Jonathan Allen asserting that the bill "comes out to about $2.24 million per word," and Sean Hannity claiming that "if you can't put this down in 30 pages or less, it proves that this is a complicated, you know, bunch of bureaucratic garbage." Read More Media conservatives try to resurrect "death panel" myth Linking to an Associated Press article about Medicare coverage for voluntary end-of-life counseling in the House health care bill, conservative media outlets such as Fox News and BigGovernment.com have featured misleading headlines to revive the widely debunked "death panel" smear. Fox News' Peter Johnson Jr. also stated during an interview with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), "So with regard to the death panel, nothing much has changed." Read More Wash. Times' bad accounting on House health care reform bill The Washington Times reported that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found the House health care reform bill "will have a gross cost of $1.06 trillion but, with $167 billion in new penalty taxes imposed on businesses and individuals, the net cost is $894 billion." But the Times' report is misleading; at no point did it explain that the $894 billion figure it cited is actually the net cost of coverage provisions, which CBO found "would be more than offset," nor did the report explain that CBO estimated the bill would generate a "net reduction in federal budget deficits of $104 billion" over the next decade. Read More Rove claimed House health bill results in "torrent of red ink" in second decade -- but CBO disagrees Fox News contributor Karl Rove falsely claimed that the House health reform bill "front-loads the revenue" but "back-loads the program costs, which means by the end of the first 10 years, this program is running annual deficits," adding that it will result in "a torrent of red ink in the second decade, when the program is fully operational." Contrary to Rove's claim, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the House bill would not only reduce federal budget deficits by $104 billion through 2019, but also that it would continue to reduce the deficit in the subsequent decade. Read More Limbaugh falsely claimed House bill "prohibits the sale" of private individual insurance Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that "page 94" of the recently released House health care bill "prohibits the sale of private individual health insurance policies beginning in 2013." In fact, the provision at issue states that private individual policies can be sold, but only through the Health Insurance Exchange and subject to its regulations. Read More The Friday Rush: Documenting Limbaugh's war on reality Here at Media Matters, we've long documented Rush Limbaugh's proclivity for disputing inconvenient facts by simply concocting his own reality in which those facts are no longer true. Like when he strung together an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw to completely change the meaning of their comments, or when he claimed that the text of the stimulus bill that was posted on the Internet wasn't searchable, even though it was. And don't forget that time he invented a "racial component" to the 2006 Senate Democratic primary in Ohio by claiming -- falsely! -- that candidate Sherrod Brown was black. Read More The real lessons of Fox/MSNBC comparisons At first blush, it may seem odd to see so many journalists rush to defend Fox News, a cable channel that attacks the rest of the media almost as often as it smears and lies about progressives. Fox employees are busily destroying what's left of the public's faith in journalism -- and lobbing insults at actual reporters as they do so. Why would any self-respecting journalist want to embrace what happens on Fox? Read More Media Matters: Conservative media's "radical" attacks are so lame On Thursday, House Democratic leaders unveiled the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The bill followed on the heels of the Senate Finance Committee's passage of its own version of health care reform legislation. Read More Legal experts debunk conservative media's claim that health reform proposals are unconstitutional Conservative media outlets including The Washington Times and Fox News have pushed the claim that health care reform proposals under consideration by Congress are unconstitutional. However, legal scholars -- including one who recently served as a special counsel to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation proceedings -- have pointed out the flaws in conservatives' arguments, including the facts that regulation of the health care sector falls under Congress' broad power to regulate interstate commerce and that Congress has repeatedly passed laws regulating health care and health insurance. Read More You can help support our work; become a volunteer media monitor, or donate to Media Matters for America.