Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama's position on entitlements:

He called the long-term solvency of Social Security "the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far" and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority.

What Obama actually said was:

In the coming years, we'll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of healthcare that Peter [Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director] described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

In other words, healthcare is by far the single most pressing fiscal challenge--not Social Security.

What's surprising is not that a reporter would misunderstand a speech--Obama's phrasing could be a little bit confusing, I guess--but that anyone who follows politics for a living wouldn't know that healthcare is a bigger problem than Social Security. Maybe they should pay less attention to corporate media.

Tags: AP, Liz Sidoti, Social Security

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.