Tribune (Sorta) Calls Out Kinder, Luetkemeyer, Blunt & Other GOPers for "Reprehensible" Misinformation Campaign

In accordance with professional journalism standards preventing reporters and columnists from naming actual names when they decry "reprehensible" behavior by politicians, the Tribune's Hank Waters has published a scathing critique of Republicans in general and no one in particular:

In my estimation, the most important political accomplishment of the past two years has been passage of the Affordable Health Care Act. Considering the irresponsible opposition of the Republican Party, it’s a miracle health care reform has gotten off the ground as well as it has.

Republicans accurately saw health care reform as one of the wedge issues they could use to defeat President Barack Obama and the Democrats, particularly among senior citizens already bludgeoned with health care delivery problems and easy to frighten with stories about losses of coverage and death panels. Right-wing conservatives made many people believe the president was bent on killing them, and the rest of the Republican Party has been complicit. It has been a reprehensible posture detrimental to the public welfare.

He's right, and maybe this particular editorial isn't the right editorial to actually talk about which persons covered by the Tribune have been part of the "reprehensible" health care opposition campaign.   But the pattern of editorial boards and columnists condemning genuinely ugly behavior without mentioning actual names is unmistakable.  (See here and here for a couple of other examples.)

Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Senator-elect Roy Blunt and many other Missouri politicians have played active roles in the death panel campaign, and in the overall anti-health care reform misinformation campaign.  All of these individual leaders are clearly leaders that the Tribune should be and is covering on a regular basis.  But very few readers in Central Missouri have ever seen a word about their lies, because few reporters or columnists covered their lies aggressively when they first appeared, and even fewer (or zero) have publicly discussed them since. 

If columnists or editorial boards or reporters are going to push back against dishonesty or extremism or bad ideas -- and they should! -- then why not be specific in describing the bad behavior?  Broad-brush critiques of politicians and parties are appropriate at times.  But too often, they underinform readers, got lost in the sea of not-very-interesting commentary and actually give the offending actors a pass.