A Persistent ObamaCare Factoid

[Geee]

American Thinker:

It used to be standard practice in journalism to corroborate. A responsible news outfit would get a second source (at the very least) to back up a story, and a good reporter would try to get it straight from the horse's mouth. This standard practice is slipping away in today's corrupt media environment. In contemporary journalism, if a factoid is being repeated by enough outlets, it's permissible to repeat an inaccuracy.

A recent example of a factoid (i.e., a spurious "fact") that the media continues to circulate comes straight from New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. In his October 12 column "A Possibly Fatal Mistake," Kristof wrote:

President Obama's care plan addresses this problem inelegantly, by forcing people like Scott to buy insurance beginning in 2014. Some will grumble about the "mandate" [...] Obamacare does address these problems, albeit in a complex and intrusive way, forcing people by a mandate to get insurance.

Notice the date of Kristof's column: three and a half months after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on ObamaCare. Despite having plenty of time to read the Court's opinion, Kristof asserts that ObamaCare forces people to buy insurance -- precisely what the Court found to be unconstitutional.The November 18 Sunday morning editorial in the print version of the Kansas City Star began with this: "The U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate in President Barack Obama's health reform law..."