By the time Washington’s next great heave toward health care reform got underway, there was no way that the newly emboldened press, then jumping enthusiastically into the “fact-checking” business, was going to let the irresponsible Republican spin machine pollute and derail such an important policy discussion again. After all, they’d seen that conservatives would “swift-boat” Democrats using the flimsiest of arguments, and many of Washington’s most respected thinkers were using their recently enhanced lie-detectors to produce such unblinking judgments as “Let’s Just Say it: Republicans Are the Problem.”

So instead of diving into the factual claims of a sitting president trying to wrestle through a major piece of domestic legislation, journalists spent thousands of column inches and hundreds of academic hours dissecting a single Facebook post by Sarah Palin. Instead of investigating the stated policy fears of anti-Obamacare townhall participants in the summer of 2009, many commentators chose to interpret those worries as unstated racism, and make wildly inaccurate predictions about an upsurge in right-wing violence. And at every step of the way, the president made sure to couple his own truth-bending efforts with journalist-pleasing claims denouncing “misinformation” and false equivalence. As recently as yesterday, the White House blog had the temerity to issue a “fact-check” correcting misapprehensions about the Obamacare rollout.

The above should not be read as blanket claims about the entire press corps; many individual journalists (including/especially those with fixed political ideologies) have been producing fine work on the Affordable Care Act for years, some of which you can see linked to in Nyhan’s CJR piece. Factcheck.org, for example, has ample reason to be proud of its efforts. But if you’re searching for answers about why so many news organizations find themselves a bit surprised this week, it’s worth gazing into recent media-criticism history, and remembering that anyone wielding government power will look to exploit whatever the refs might give them.