… if not for one slightly obsessed citizen, we wouldn’t have the videos of Jonathan Gruber saying the health care law was deceptively designed and its passage depended on the stupidity of the American public.
Thus writes
Howard Kurtz in a Fox News article that can ring a bell with many bloggers.
And it is about his frustrating struggle to get that information out to the media.
… Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser … is up front about the fact that his motives were personal.
His insurance policy was canceled, he says, because of the Affordable
Care Act, and his premiums wound up doubling.
He started out searching for another administration adviser and then
switched to Gruber. He sat through hour after tedious hour of video
taken at academic conferences and in other settings.
This helps explain why a self-described regular guy was able to
unearth what the media could not. Few news organizations could afford to
have a reporter 
spend a long period searching for a needle in an online
haystack, especially without a tip that the needle existed at all.
Maybe everything that Gruber had to say about the law he helped devise
was boring. But Weinstein kept at it, although he did give up the search
for awhile during his kids’ lacrosse season.
Last December, Weinstein found one video in which Gruber, an MIT
professor, said that ObamaCare subscribers wouldn’t get tax benefits if
their states didn’t set up health care exchanges, meaning they would be
losing out to those in states that did create the websites.
That’s when Weinstein used every means he could think of, from
Facebook to phone calls, to get the attention of journalists. He says he
tried getting messages to Fox News, Forbes, National Review, Glenn Beck
and a network affiliate in Philadelphia where a friend worked. Nobody
bit. Nobody called back.
“It was so frustrating,” Weinstein said. “I tried really hard to give
this to the media. I had this and couldn’t get it to anybody that knows
what to do with it.” All he wanted, Weinstein says, was a train ride to
D.C. for him and his lawyer, and “I was going to give them everything
for nothing, no money, all I wanted was autographed pictures of the
people I was working with to hang on my office wall.”
Crickets.
He finally posted a comment on the web page of the Volokh Conspiracy,
a group of conservative lawyers whose blog is hosted by the Washington
Post. A conservative activist picked it up, and Forbes
wound up carrying a piece by contributor Michael Cannon, dubbed by the
New Republic “Obamacare’s Single Most Relentless Antagonist.”
It wasn’t until shortly before the midterms that Weinstein found what
came to be known as Gruber’s “stupidity” video. He plastered it on his
Twitter feed days later, sometimes inserting the names of journalists to
try to grab their attention. This time, the news was quickly picked up
by Fox, the Daily Caller and other media outlets (but not the broadcast
networks or major newspapers).
… he had a parting thought about the press and citizen journalists.
There must be more Weinsteins out there, maybe one in each state, and
they need a forum. The media have “got to open up a gateway,” he said,
to receive such information.
