And the Media Gets Played By the GOP Again

Remember that recent CBO report that media types and Republicans have been breathlessly citing as an analysis as to why the stimulus package won’t work?

Well, it turns out that no such report exists:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

And apparently the portion of the bill that the CBO reviewed has been substantially changed since the data was provided to the CBO. The preliminary numbers were leaked by Mitch McConnell’s office — and while McConnell’s people didn’t make sure that the reporters knew the limitations of this data, it took until the past couple of days for other reporters (and it looks like just the Huffington Post and American Prospect, so far) to get a good look at the document and to actually verify with the CBO what this data really covers.

So I’m trying to understand — the DC GOP has been passing as much misinformation as they possibly can to the media (misinformation that eventually gets caught and exposed and corrected with as much derision as possible for the traditional media) for the past 8 years AND THEY ARE STILL FALLING FOR THIS MESS? An institution that no longer commands the respect that it once did really has to account for easy stuff like this. It isn’t hard to fact check CBO data, and it is not hard to describe for an audience the limits of the information that you are presenting. Or maybe the job of the traditional media really is to just write down what someone tells you and print it. In which case, they really need to stop looking down their noses at bloggers and new media venues.