Dems' Potemkin SCHIP kid exposed in Blogosphere

[GaryC 7]

October 7, 5:11 PM

President Bush used his regular Saturday radio address yesterday to explain and defend his veto of the massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) approved last week by Congress.

Regular readers here will recall that an internal memo written during the 1993 Hillarycare process makes clear that SCHIP expansion advocates view the program as a major step on the road to universal coverage through a government-run health care delivery system - i.e. socialized medicine.

An hour later on national radio, the Democrats' response to Bush was delivered by Baltimore private middle school student Graeme Frost, who along with his sister was seriously injured in an auto accident three years ago. His response to Bush was actually recorded earlier in the week and Matthew Hay Brown, a reporter from The Baltimore Sun, interviewed the young man after he did his recording.

Frost said his parents work hard to provide for him and his sister but one thing they can't afford is private health insurance, so they have to depend upon the government program, Brown reported for The Sun.

Perfect illustration of why the SCHIP program should be expanded, right? Actually, no, because the Sun only reported the Democratic version of the story and we can't depend upon a mainstream media outlet like the Sun to get the rest of the story.

It turns out the Frost family sends its kids to one of Baltimore's expensive private schools, owns a house in a neighborhood of homes valued in the $400,000-500,000 range and bought commercial property in 1999 for $160,000.

So, Frost's father is self-employed and owns the building in which he works. His father makes about $45,000 a year, while his mother is employed at an unspecified salary by a medical publishing house that doesn't provide health insurance coverage.

Bottomline? Two points. First, people make choices and it's clear the Frosts have made choice to invest in property and a business, but not in private health insurance. The Maryland-administered version of the federal SCHIP program, by the way, does not impose an asset test on applicants.

Second, we know these additional important details about the Frost family because a poster at Free Republic asked the kind of "trust but verify" questions MSMers rarely address to Democrats on the national scene, then did the digging to get the facts.

Then Blogospherians like Bruce Kesler, a regular oped contributor to The Washington Examiner, at Democracy Project and Wizbangblog's Kim Priestap, another Examiner oped contributor, added to the Frost fact cloud.

When I first started working with and among journalists in the mid-1970s, there was still enough of the old school skepticism in the ranks that I quickly learned a good reporter always assumed there was more to a story than was being told by any one participant in it, which meant you had to keep digging and asking, digging and asking, to get all of the facts.

Put otherwise, you had to have a healthy skepticism about everything you were told by politicians, office-holders and public policy advocates across the entire political spectrum. But I see less and less of that kind of healthy skepticism among journalists when it comes to claims and conduct by Democrats and liberal activists.

Increasingly, getting the whole story about an issue in public policy these days starts with the Blogosphere because to a growing extent that is where you find educated skepticism and a willingness to dig for the facts.

I tell attendees at the outset of the Database 101 Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) Boot Camps I teach at the National Press Club that I dream of the day when "let me see your dataset" is the first thing all journalists will say when a politician or advocate claims something based on a data-driven study.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if all journalists would greet all claims by all politicians and advocates with a healthy dose of Mencken-esque skepticism - i.e. as requiring verification before publication?

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters points to a segment on this morning's edition of Howard Kurtz' "Reliable Sources" show on CNN in which a couple of prominent MSMers explain why they approach some numbers with more caution than others.

Powerline's Scott Johnson estimates the odds that the typical MSMer will do the work - this process used to be called "burning shoe leather" - to research a story like this one. Prairie Pundit has some great links to Blue Crab Boulevard and Mark Steyn's NRO The Corner post on the Frost story. http://www.examiner.com/blogs/tapscotts_co...ere-was-the-MSM

[Peikko 1,575]

The relationship between poor journalism and a Democrats definintion of poverty seems a little tenuous to me.

Also, that some entrepreneur wants to buck any system doesn't really make the system good/bad or indiferent, it just shows that he's a #######, in my opinion.

[GaryC 7]

The relationship between poor journalism and a Democrats definition of poverty seems a little tenuous to me.

Also, that some entrepreneur wants to buck any system doesn't really make the system good/bad or indifferent, it just shows that he's a #######, in my opinion.

But this is the kid the dems chose to be their spokesperson. It seems they could have made a better choice.