Last week, our own former editor Max Sparber tweeted: “If you’re going to print Sarah Palin without factchecking her, you probably don’t deserve to be a newspaper.” Well, perhaps the same can be said for U.S. Rep Michele Bachmann. But it seems that many media agencies already know this as they are now calling her out for repeatedly misstating economist Christina Romer on the number of jobs impacted by health care reform and the percentage of Americans favoring the bill.
According to the Minnesota Independent, “Bachmann told Fox’s Sean Hannity that ‘President Obama’s bill will mean 5.5 million jobs lost, and that’s according to his own economist, Christina Romer.’ But Romer has never said such a thing. That number was cooked up by Republicans based on a faulty analysis of Romer’s research, according to the St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact.”
In fact, what Romer really said was that, “Controlling health care cost growth would allow lower unemployment in the short and medium run, without putting pressure on inflation. Employment could be 500,000 higher for a number of years.”
Of course, perhaps little surprises us when it comes to Bachmann at this point. See her 10 biggest “Oh no she didn’t” moments over at City Pages.
9 Reader Comments
11:58 am
Math is hard, Let’s go shopping!
12:03 pm
Shopping is hard, let’s do math!
12:53 pm
What is frustrating about an error like this is that it will get repeated and repeated and repeated so often by word of mouth or blog entry that the error will eventually be considered “too true” to change.
That is a downside to having so much social media available. No one bothers to fact-check or — ahem — question the “authority” of faux news purveyors like Limbaugh and Hannity.
12:56 pm
Even in Mark Twain’s day, he noted that a lie could circle the world twice while the truth was still putting its pants on.
10:34 am
It’s a darn good thing Michelle is the only government rep tossing out fake numbers. Doesn’t it make life easy when you know ahead of time the dems numbers are right?
fools.
4:18 pm
I’d much rather see her top 10 “don’t go there” and “talk to the hand” moments.
6:49 pm
Math is hard, Let’s go shopping!
Shopping is hard, let’s do math!
This will satisfy both of you: Go shopping and then figure out how much sales tax you would have paid if we taxed all the things you didn’t pay sales tax on.
6:49 pm
Then, makeout.
9:13 pm
But if we had a GST, we wouldn’t need payroll deductions, either, for an income tax. Just continue paying into Medicare and FICA.