Political coverage

Krugman blasts away at Giuliani's ongoing bullshit regarding health care, his prostate, and the scary Democrats' socialized medicine, and he asks a question.

But here’s what I don’t understand: Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?

He continues.

For better or (mostly) for worse, political reporting is dominated by the search for the supposedly revealing incident, in which the candidate says or does something that reveals his true character. And this incident surely seems to fit the bill.

Leave aside the fact that Mr. Giuliani is simply lying about what the Democrats are proposing; after all, Mitt Romney is doing the same thing.

But health care is the pre-eminent domestic issue for the 2008 election. Surely the American people deserve candidates who do their homework on the subject.

Yet what we actually have is the front-runner for the Republican nomination apparently basing his health-care views on something he read somewhere, which he believed without double-checking because it confirmed his prejudices.

By rights, then, Mr. Giuliani’s false claims about prostate cancer — which he has, by the way, continued to repeat, along with some fresh false claims about breast cancer — should be a major political scandal. As far as I can tell, however, they aren’t being treated that way.

To be fair, there has been some news coverage of the prostate affair. But it’s only a tiny fraction of the coverage received by Hillary’s laugh and John Edwards’s haircut.

And much of the coverage seems weirdly diffident. Memo to editors: If a candidate says something completely false, it’s not “in dispute.” It’s not the case that “Democrats say” they’re not advocating British-style socialized medicine; they aren’t.

That "weirdly diffident" coverage was a reference to the very paper that employs him, by the way.

But just weird is the "coverage" that appears directly opposite Prof. Krugman in today's print edition.

So, Paul, I think your employer has answered your question for you.