Who are You and What Have You Done With Lori Montgomery

You can't rely on anything anymore. There are Toyota recalls and unBallanced articles in the Washington Post. Just recently Lori Montgomery wrote a long article about how the deficit was mostly created by the choices of Republicans when they had the White House and both houses of Congress. This is true, she just reported official numbers and noted which ones are larger than the others, but it is not Ballanced to report the numbers, since numbers have a known liberal bias.

Now she just wrote, and I quote

But he [Cantor] said Republicans recognize they may need to look elsewhere to achieve consensus after President Obama “excoriated us” for a proposal to privatize Medicare.

Notice Montgomery wrote "a proposal to privatize Medicare" in her own voice. She didn't write as any Ballanced journalist would "what he alleged was a proposal to privatize Medicare." This is shocking. What's more she wrote her claim in the same sentence where she quoted Cantor. This might appear to a very stupid Republican operative as an attempt to suggest that Cantor said that the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare is a plan to privatize Medicare. More importantly, a non-stupid Republican operative is probably calling the Post to complain dishonestly claiming that MOntgomery put the word "privatize" in Cantor's mouth. This is how they work the refs.

It seems the refs have lost their patience.

Fred Hiatt wrote a column about how the Republicans deny reality. Various bloggers asked if Hiatt has personal reasons to leave the village or if the consensus has become that "opinions on shape of planet differ and one side is totally full of it."
I scoffed at the thought that the second explanation was possible.

Now I wonder. I almost think that an order has come down saying, more or less, to hell with Kaplan U, we used to be journalists and we can be journalists again.

On the other hand, stating that a plan to privatize Medicare is a plan to privatize Medicare might be a slip. I have saved a screen shot in case it is corrected to remove the factual (equavalent to "factual error" to Ballanced journalists).



Now her willingness to state facts as she sees them doesn't make Montgomery understand economics. She also wrote, in a news article, "a national debt that has risen to alarming levels." In her own voice she makes an evaluation. She didn't note the fact that the national debt has alarmed many people. She assert in her own voice that it is allarming. I consider the deficit to be alarmingly low given unemployment and interest rates. I'd rather the debt were much lower, but I'd rather nothing be done about it for years.

I think that Montgomery here thinks that the inside the beltway consensus is the objective truth. She shows professionalism which, as defined by her colleague Ignatius consists of treating as certainly true any point where Republican officials and most Democratic officials agree.

Still the fact that a contested fact was given equal standing with an uncontested but questionable claim is huge progress.