American-Manifesto.com In Defense of American Exceptionalism

The legacy media continues to not quite grasp the fact that they no longer have a monopoly on information.  Nicholas Kristof and the NY Times provide us with another shining example.  It’s an over the top story about a guy who lost his job and his insurance and has a potentially fatal health problem that he can’t get treated for lack of insurance.  Kristof, of course, says it’s “monstrous” for the nation not to pass Obamacare.

Fortunately, Michelle Malkin has a very good bullshit detector.  She decided to actually do research that consisted of more than taking the patients word for it.  It turns out there are a number of problems with the piece.  My favorites are:

1. The guy was already enrolled in Medicaid
2. The guy was already a patient being treated at a regional hospital

Oops.  That kind of makes the whole piece pointless.

What I find so amazing is that guys like Kristof (twice Pulitzered) and the NYT (many Pulitzers) think they can still get away with shoddy, incomplete, fact-mangling journalism (translation: the good old days).  They still don’t get the fact that the internet has made information available to the rest of us that used to only be available to them.  There was a time when Kristof could write a piece like that and no one would be the wiser.  But they just can’t take for granted anymore that someone like Michelle won’t smell the bullshit and do the research.  I wonder sometimes if we need to assign a fact checker to just about every substantial story written in the legacy media.