The American Spectator

Yet Krugman frequently cites CBO analyses as authoritative when they agree with his left-liberal ideology. The same week that Obama insisted his campaign wasn’t negative, Krugman wrote that the office had “found that [Obamacare] would reduce, not increase, the deficit.” That was in the course of denouncing Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson as “unethical” for having observed accurately in an anti-Obama cover story that CBO projections found its “insurance-coverage provisions…will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period” (emphasis mine).

Krugman’s faults are legion, but as he is an opinion writer, simple bias is not among them. The complaint of “false balance,” however, amounts to a rejection of balance itself—to a demand that news reporters abandon any pretense of ideological evenhandedness.

Obama’s “critique” of the media takes the Taranto Principle to a new level. He is not only taken in when liberal journalists give him unrealistically favorable coverage but also insulated when they give him realistically unfavorable coverage.

The latter sort of insularity is a danger for conservative politicians as well. Correctly expecting the media to be biased against them, they are apt to minimize indications of genuine popular discontent. But Obama, by means of his tendentious “critique,” has managed to make himself impervious even to friendly criticism.