By Charles Lipson - June 23, 2015

What happens when the news media catch the White House in a demonstrable lie? That depends entirely on whether they like the administration. If they loathe the administration, it’s front-page news. If they like it, they spike the story. As Momma used to remind us, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. What a great motto for reporters.

That is exactly what the national media have done to an important story about the White House’s intimate working relationship with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who helped craft the Affordable Care Act. You may remember Gruber from his infamous videotapes, the ones in which he called the American public too stupid to understand the law. He added their stupidity was helpful to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid in passing the law.

The Obama administration snapped into action. At a press conference, the president noted that Gruber was not employed by the White House and said flatly that he had not played an important role in drafting the law. Nancy Pelosi said the same thing. On background, senior White House officials reinforced the story. They vaguely remembered somebody named Gruber or Goober or something but, fortunately, he played only a marginal role in health care. Thanks for asking. Next question?

Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out the White House knew Gruber very well and knew he played a crucial role in the health care bill. The White House simply decided to lie about it. Perhaps they agree with Gruber’s judgment about your intelligence.

How do we know about Gruber’s role? Not because the White House released any documents, not because the media dug into it, but because the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, got MIT to turn over the relevant emails. There were 20,000 pages of emails back-and-forth between Gruber and the White House in the crucial months when the bill was being crafted and passed.


The Wall Street Journal just revealed the news about the Oversight Committee getting these emails in a major story. The key points are that Gruber was deeply involved in crafting the health care law, he worked very closely with the White House, and, when he became a political liability, the president and his senior aides simply lied about it.

Is that a big story? Not if you are a national TV network or major U.S. newspaper. Except for the Wall Street Journal, they maintained radio silence. Not a peep.

A search of the New York Times shows zero hits for “Gruber” this week. All the News That’s Fit to Print? The Washington Post has one hit, a brief comment by an online opinion columnist. Regional newspapers like the Chicago Tribune: zero. It was covered on Fox’s morning show and, in a very revealing exchange, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The network shows – Good Morning America, the Today Show, and CBS This Morning – have eight hours of air time but did not mention it at all. Zilch. They could have squeezed it in without shortchanging the Kardashians or Brian Williams’ landing on the moon.

What happened on Morning Joe was fascinating. One of the hosts, Mika Brzezinski, called attention to the Journal story. Her co-host, former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough, followed up. Turning to Mark Halperin, who is the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and a former senior reporter at Time, Scarborough asked if the story was inconsistent with White House statements. “I owe my Republican sources an apology,” Halperin said, “because they kept telling me he [Gruber] was hugely involved, and the White House played it down.”

Then Scarborough asked the money question: “Did the White House lie about that?”

“I think they were not fully forthcoming.”

That answer did not come from a White House official or a Democratic operative. It came from a big-time reporter. And not just any reporter. It came from a reporter to whom the White House had deliberately lied in background briefings. Does he call them out? Nope. He spins for them.

Halperin’s circumlocution shows the rot that pervades America’s mainstream media. He cannot bring himself to say more than “they were not fully forthcoming.” Morning Joe’s panel of Democratic stalwarts, including Howard Dean, actually laughed out loud. When they were asked the same question—did the White House lie?—they kept laughing and said “they were not fully forthcoming.” I guess the joke’s on us.

As lies go, it’s not a huge one. It’s not like saying, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance. Period.” That wasn’t just fraud; it was fraud that played an essential role in passing Obamacare. The president knew it was false when he said it, and he said it repeatedly.

Still, the latest Gruber episode tells us something troubling and important. If the media share the White House’s political views, then journalists and editors will refuse to do their essential job: truthful reporting. They will spike the story. On the same spike, they impale what is left of their reputations.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/article...ons_127088.html

from the Washington Examiner...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obamas...article/2566882

Obama's grubby deception on Gruber
BY WASHINGTON EXAMINER | JUNE 24, 2015

Shortly after last fall's election, tapes surfaced of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber smugly describing how deception, "lack of transparency" and "the stupidity of the American voter" had been "critical" in allowing Democrats who controlled Congress to ram Obamacare through in 2010.

This was important because the law Gruber helped write restructured nearly a fifth of the national economy and upended many people's healthcare arrangements. The Obama administration paid him some $400,000 for his efforts, and he also managed to snag millions more dollars for consulting gigs with various state Obamacare exchanges.

When Gruber's comments surfaced, no one ran away from him as quickly as President Obama, who dismissed him as "some adviser who never worked on our staff." The president and his officials pretended that Gruber had been a bit player in the passage of the law.

It turns out, however, that this was as wildly inaccurate as Obama's promise that his reforms would allow people to keep their health plans if they wanted to.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported on 20,000 pages of emails between Gruber and federal officials that pertain directly to Obamacare's development and passage. The academic appears to have earned his pay, having been in nearly constant communication with Obama's top economic, healthcare and budget officials. He had the ear of Larry Summers, who was the president's top economic adviser, who at one point actually wrote to him asking: "If you were POTUS, what would u do now?" That's not the sort of email that many people receive — certainly not those at the lower end of the cast of characters. Gruber was also invited in summer 2009 to meet with Obama himself.

He played a role in persuading wavering Democrats in Congress, such as former Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., to vote for Obamacare. He was privy to inside information as the White House negotiated with labor unions over a provision they disliked and wanted removed from the bill. He provided the White House with information on who would be the "winners" and who would be the "losers" when Obamacare became law.

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from the Wall Street Journal

By STEPHANIE ARMOUR
Updated June 21, 2015

Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist whose comments about the health-care law touched off a political furor, worked more closely than previously known with the White House and top federal officials to shape the law, previously unreleased emails show.

The emails, provided by the House Oversight Committee to The Wall Street Journal, cover messages Mr. Gruber sent from January 2009 through March 2010. Committee staffers said they worked with MIT to obtain the 20,000 pages of emails.

The committee released the information in the days before the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a lawsuit that could strike down subsidies on the federal health-care insurance exchange.

The emails show frequent consultations between Mr. Gruber and top Obama administration staffers and advisers in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services on the Affordable Care Act. They show he informed HHS about interviews with reporters and discussions with lawmakers, and he consulted with HHS about how to publicly describe his role.

The administration has sought to distance itself from the economist in the wake of his controversial statements in a 2013 video, where he said the health law passed because of the “huge political advantage” of the legislation’s lacking transparency. He also referred to the “stupidity of the American voter.”

Republicans seized on the comments as evidence that supporters of the law purposely misled the public about its costs. Mr. Gruber received nearly $400,000 from HHS for his work focusing on health-policy computer models, according to public records.


The White House has described Mr. Gruber as having a limited role in crafting the law. President Barack Obama in 2014 said Mr. Gruber was “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” Mr. Gruber told Congress last year he disagreed with the widespread characterization of his role as the “architect” of Mr. Obama’s health-care plan.

“His proximity to HHS and the White House was a whole lot tighter than they admitted,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), chairman of the House oversight committee. “There’s no doubt he was a much more integral part of this than they’ve said. He put up this facade he was an arm’s length away. It was a farce.”

Mr. Chaffetz on Sunday sent a letter to HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell requesting information justifying the department’s sole-source contract with Mr. Gruber for his work on the health law.

Mr. Gruber declined to comment.

Meaghan Smith, an HHS spokeswoman, said: “As has been previously reported, Mr. Gruber was a widely used economic modeler for administrations and state governments run by both parties—both before and after the Affordable Care Act was passed. These emails only echo old news.”

An HHS official said Mr. Gruber possessed a statistically sophisticated microsimulation model to evaluate how the change in the number of individuals with health insurance coverage would affect costs to the government and the private sector. In 2010, an independent Inspector General responding to a request from Republican Senators reviewed documentation related to Mr. Gruber’s HHS contracts and found the agency met federal requirements for both contracts, according to the HHS official.

The emails show Mr. Gruber was in touch with key advisers such as Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House that oversaw federal programs.

He was also in contact with Jason Furman, an economic adviser to the president, and Ezekiel Emanuel, who was then a special adviser for health policy at OMB.

One email indicates Mr. Gruber was invited to meet with Mr. Obama. In a July 2009 email, he wrote that Mr. Orszag had “invited me to meet with the head honcho to talk about cost control.”

“Thank you for being an integral part of getting us to this historic moment,” according to Sept. 9, 2009 email to Mr. Gruber from Jeanne Lambrew, a top Obama administration health adviser who worked at HHS and the White House. In a November 2009 email, she called Mr. Gruber “our hero.”

In an August 2009 email, Lawrence Summers—then a top economic adviser in the administration—emailed Mr. Gruber and asked “if you were POTUS, what would u do now?” Mr. Gruber responded that Mr. Obama should hold out for enough money to do universal coverage.

snip

http://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-economis...show-1434910195