A Hack For All Seasons.

Jamison Foser discusses some egregious hackwork from Ceci Connolly. To summarize, Connolly first mentioned a laughably bogus PriceWaterhouse Coopers report that found that health-care reform would increase premiums $4,000 a year ... if one relied on assumptions that were admittedly false and ignored cost savings in reform bills. In a follow-up article today, she assessed the worthless insurance-company-propaganda "study" she discussed uncritically the previous day but analyzed it in a classic "shape of the earth: views differ" manner. Really, powerful insurance interests have disproportionate enough power in our political system without having major newspapers stacking the deck so strongly in their favor.

But, of course, this is exactly what you can expect when you expect Connolly to do a reporter's job. Let us remember her performance covering Al Gore in 2000:

But lots of well-known embellishment stories were not legitimate, such as the infamous Love Canal incident. When Gore spoke at Concord High School in New Hampshire on November 30th, 1999, and urged students to take an active role in politics, he recalled that it was a letter years before from a student in Toone, Tennessee, that got then-Rep. Gore interested in the topic of toxic waste. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue -- and Toone, Tennessee, that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

The next day, both the Washington Post and the New York Times botched the quote, erroneously reporting Gore had bragged, "I was the one that started it all."

The Post's Ceci Connolly, who covered Gore campaign for eighteen months and made the error, today insists that her miscue "did not change the context" of Gore's original statement. She contends that the key quote, the one that catches Gore embellishing, was the quote "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Yet clearly from his response, Gore used the term "found" in reference to "looking around the country for other sites like" Toone, and in no way suggested he uncovered the Love Canal toxic-waste disaster.

And, of course, Connolly was also happy to hype the erroneous Gore stories she wasn't personally responsible for. It goes without saying that if the Washington Post cared about informing its readers it wouldn't have Connolly anywhere near the most important domestic issue given her track record.

--Scott Lemieux