Michelle Bernard has frequently been a guest over the last year or two on Hardball with Chris Matthews. I had always believed that she was a centrist until I recently stumbled upon factcheck.org this morning. The latest headline on factcheck.org is "A False Appeal to Women’s Fears: Republican-leaning group claims health care legislation could lead to 300,000 deaths from breast cancer, but uses old statistics, faulty logic and false insinuations." The group behind the latest smear on health care reform is the Independent Women's Forum. Michelle Bernard is the President and CEO of the IWF.
The IWF's new ad claims that "300,000 American women with breast cancer might have died" if US health care were "government run" like England’s. Their supposed source for this phony statistic is the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society? The American Cancer Society quickly wanted to dispel the myth that they were behind the phony numbers cited by the IWF.
"The ad implies, intentionally or not, that we (The American Cancer Society) did come up with that figure. In addition to the fact that the figure is not a reliable figure, it’s not one that we have ever cited; it’s not one that we would ever cite," says Steven Weiss, senior director of media advocacy for the ACS Cancer Action Network (From Factcheck.org Article).
I feel that factcheck.org does a very good job of exposing the lies of Bernard's IWF's ad (including the fact that the ad uses the Lewin Group as a source), so I will not waste your time and continue to reiterate factcheck.org's findings here. You can read their full review of the ad by clicking here. I just wanted to point out how suprised I was to discover that Michelle Bernard, who always appeared to be somewhat of a centrist, is just another lobbyist who is willing to blatantly lie about healthcare reform. Whether you agree or disagree with her politically, she is obviously a very smart person. There is no way that she believes that any of the claims in her groups ad are even close to being true. I am pretty sure that she once disclosed on Hardball that she voted for Obama, which makes this even more surprising.
But putting my surprise aside, why is she treated as a serious journalist on shows like Hardball? I have not seen her on the show for a while, although I do not watch Hardball very often. I would love to see Matthews confront her on the ad.
Source:
http://factcheck.org/...