New York Times: “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots.”

From a reader:

Idle observation: I have been waiting all morning for the crack Corner research staff to find its way to the Bush-era lead NYT headline that said: False ‘Bush knew in advance of 9/11′ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots.”
Cheers and thanks for all the great work,

If you haven’t read the story, it’s the usual connect-the-dots to blame dishonest and crazy rightwingers piece gussied up as truth-squadding. My own question is why the Times couldn’t bother to at least quote Obama’s interview with . . . the New York Times:

LEONHARDT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
LEONHARDT: So how do you – how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

I don’t think Obama’s calling for a death panel here, if by death panel you mean something out of Logan’s Run. But, it sure sounds like something that even a non-conspiratorial person might worry about. If Obama said he wanted a “free-speech panel” to offer guidance on what newspapers should or shouldn’t say, the Times would get its knickers in quite a twist (at least I hope they would).

Also, now that I think of it, the Times story could also have mentioned a huge piece by Peter Singer in this magazine called the New York Times magazine called “Why We Must Ration Health Care.” It drips with examples, illustrations, and arguments about why oldsters should be offed to save money. Again, it can’t be held against Obama, but if you’re trying to figure out why conservatives think liberals want to do this sort of thing, the Times might ponder just a bit harder where conservatives got the idea in the first place. It’s all fine to point fingers at Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, but both of those guys actually cite evidence that comes from the Left’s own words and actions. A real truth-squadding piece would look at the actual evidence.

Update: Brendan Nyhan thinks the Times story is just frick’n awesome, just as it is:

This story is a remarkable achievement given the pressure for artificial “balance” in news reporting. Let’s hope the rest of the media follows suit — the condemnation has to be near-universal to change the incentives for promoting misinformation.