Fox News Special Report panelist and Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen F. Hayes accused the national news media Tuesday of providing cover for Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act, and of enabling bad behavior by the Obama administration.
“I’m troubled by the administration’s attempt to distance itself from one of the architects of Obamacare. But I guess I’ve come to expect that from this president, from his administration, this is what they do,” Hayes said during a discussion on the White House’s attempt to minimize damage from Gruber’s claim that Obamacare passed thanks to the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of transparency” about it as officials wrote it.
“They’re not afraid, I think, to be dishonest if it furthers their interest. I’m equally troubled by the reporters who are refusing to cover this or, in some cases, actually pretending that he is not who they said he was just months ago,” Hayes said.
Hayes then alluded to Politico’s Paige Winfield Cunningham, who wrote in July that Gruber was one of “Obamacare’s chief architects” but now asks: “Was Jonathan Gruber the ‘architect’?”
“This is hackery,” Hayes said. “This is just dishonest journalism. I think journalists have a lot to answer for in terms of being deceived or being enablers of the administration in the first place to pass Obamacare. But they have even more to answer for right now.”
The Washington Examiner has asked Cunningham for a response to Hayes’ comment.
“This has all of the elements of a good journalistic story. It has conflict of interest. It has outright deception. It is the kind of inside Washington story that journalists who work in this town should love and the people who are today pretending that this isn’t a story, they’re not journalists; they’re enablers, they’re working for the administration,” the conservative columnist added.
Hayes added that Republicans who were previously “reluctant” to go after Obamacare now have no choice given that the conservative base is very much aware of the Gruber controversy.
