What echo chamber? ABC News turns to Jonathan Gruber to discuss recent Obamacare ruling

Yes, that Jonathan Gruber. In a country of 325 million, the network turned to the one person who absolutely can’t be trusted to speak honestly about Obamacare to explain why the judge’s ruling is wrong. It’s a real mystery why the news media have a credibility problem.

“If they decide to strike this down, what’s at risk is enormous, both for individual health and for the health of our democracy,” Gruber told ABC News. “If the ACA goes away, that means 17 million people lose their health insurance. That means that 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions can now be denied insurance because of those conditions. That means that those under age 26 can no longer get health insurance on their parents’ plan.”

He added, “This is a broad-reaching law which has fundamentally changed U.S. healthcare. And what’s crazy about this decision is the notion that [because the individual mandate] is taken away, the whole law has to come down. … This judge is essentially saying, ‘I don’t like what Congress said. I’m going to side differently.’”

I agree with Gruber when he says it’s a bad ruling. But let’s hear that argument from anyone else but the guy who is best known for bragging about the amount of deceit that was required to pass former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. If you want a good-faith argument from an honest broker, go read my Washington Examiner colleague Phil Klein, who writes that U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor’s Obamacare ruling is an “assault on the rule of law.”

As for ABC: Was there no one else available to talk about the ruling? Did the producers exhaust their lists of healthcare experts before going, “Screw it. Get the guy who was hauled before Congress for bragging repeatedly that Obamacare was passed thanks to a series of lies”? Also, I can’t stress enough just how amusing it is that at least one news network has gone back to drawing on Gruber as an Obamacare expert. I’m so old, I remember when newsrooms dedicated no small amount of energy downplaying his involvement in the drafting of the healthcare law. I mean, there’s a reason why media have gone from referring to Gruber as the “Obamacare architect” to a guy who simply “advised Obama on healthcare,” as ABC described him this week.

Lastly, ABC’s bizarre assault on its own credibility reminds me that Gruber’s notoriety represents a broader failure by the news industry. Remember: Those infamous videos weren’t unearthed by the press. They were discovered by a private citizen, Rich Weinstein, whose findings were rejected by the first newsrooms he approached. “Nobody would listen to me,” Weinstein told the Examiner in 2015. “So I was trying to contact journalists directly because I had this stuff.” Those tapes were out there in the public, ready for anyone to see — except for the Obama fanboys who didn’t want to see them. Reporters charged with bringing Americans their news were not interested, naturally.

That ABC News should bring out Gruber this week as a credible Obamacare expert suggests that certain newsrooms learned nothing from that entire “stupidity of voters” episode.

And we wonder why people don’t trust the press.