Enter
Boonstra, a cancer patient, says
in the ad that as a result of her
plan’s cancellation, her “out-ofpocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable.” She continues, like so:
I believed the president. I believed I could keep my health
insurance plan. I feel lied to.
It’s heartbreaking for me. Congressman Peters, your decision
to vote for Obamacare jeopardized my health.
Scoop, if true. Enter The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler (and
HuffPost’s Ashley Woods), who
did the fact-checking spadework and discovered that the ad’s
claims didn’t add up. Peters, as
you might expect, cried foul and
complained to the television stations airing the ad. Further documentation was provided by AFP,
but, as it turns out, that documentation “doesn’t actually back
up the ad’s key claim.”
And that’s all in a day’s work on
the fact-checking beat, with the
good news for AFP being that the
information conveyed by the factcheckers will inevitably fail to be
as widely broadcast as the original
ad itself. But the Washington Examiner, for some reason, believes
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
03.02.14
that fact-checking the ad was out
of bounds: “Their first priority
should be fact-checking politicians, not private citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.”
By the Examiner’s reckoning, it took way too long for factcheckers to lambaste President
Barack Obama for his “If you like
your plan, you can keep it.” As the
Examiner editorial notes, “The
My advice to Americans
for Prosperity is that if they
want to create an attack ad
around an Obamacare victim,
they should go out and find
one whose claims actually
authentically fit the bill.”
Washington Post’s ‘Fact Checker’
blog, for example, didn’t award
four Pinocchios to Obama’s claim
until Oct. 30[, 2013] — more
than three years after the law
was signed, and only after people
were getting cancellation letters.”
That’s a fair point — though it
should be added that the veracity
of Obama’s claim was impugned
well before 2013. Here, for example, is a September 2010 article