Re: The C-SPAN Lie? See Eight Clips of Obama Promising Televised Healthcare Negotiati
The funny thing about it is...YOU KNOW you are the wrong side when CSPAN is calling out Obama. Either CSPAN is part of the grand right-wing conspiracy that lies all the time, or Obama(AND Pelosi Co. since she had to insert her nose in this) is a liar. The first will make any liberal look absurdly ridiculous and undermine what they have been saying about any type of news that they disagree with, the second is a pill that is simply just too big to swallow.
Look again, DW. CSPAN isn't calling Obama out. That would be Breitbart TV, and Politifact.
And don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have seen the negotiations on this bill on TV someplace, and while one of the CSPAN networks would probably have been the best place for it, it's possible that Obama wasn't so much lying, as not knowing that he would be unable to get CSPAN to do his bidding.
CSPAN, for those who don't know, is government television, that is not run by any government - local, state, or federal. It's a privately owned network, paid for and operated by a conglomerate of all the national, and a good number of the regional cable companies across the country. All costs and operating expenses come out of customer subscription fees for those cable/satellite companies that carry the CSPAN networks.
Now, maybe CSPAN thought that the healthcare bill negotiations were going to be even more boring than what they usually have on. Maybe they didn't have the resources to cover the senate, congress, and a separate feed soley for the negotiations. Maybe Obama never even asked. At this point, I don't think that anyone can definitively say , however, that Obama lied about this.
I'm not saying he didn't lie, and I'm not saying he did. I'm just saying that we don't know for a fact one way or the other at this point. Intentional or not, however, it
is still a promise broken, and one that would have been better kept, in my opinion. At least the public would have had the chance to see what actually transpired in those negotiations, and not gotten everything third hand, from spokespeople, lobbyists, political analysts and everyone but the people at the negotiating table.
Perhaps if it had been televised, we wouldn't have had to wade through all of the crap from both sides over the last six months.