The Small Business Majority and the Denver Post

August 31st, 2009 10:05 AM

I know it's accepted by now that the MSM group will label any conservative group, "conservative," any libertarian group, "conservative," and any liberal group, "left-leaning" or "centrist," when they bother to label them at all.  But when a new one comes along, it's good to put both that group's leanings, and the MSM's failure to note them, on the record.

The Denver Post recently ran a story about small business's internal divide over health care "reform."  In it, this:

Despite those fears, a study from the nonprofit Small Business Majority found health reform, even with a mandate, would save small business more than $500 billion over the next decade.

"Should everybody be in?" asked Elisabeth Arenales, an analyst with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy. "What's the contribution of the business sector? Businesses stand to gain a lot from health-insurance reform."

The CCLP may be talking about small business, but that doesn't mean it's speaking for small business.  Far from it.

As for the Small Business Majority, it's definitely a "left-leaning" advocacy group, with a pretty typical pedigree for such recent endeavors.  Founded by a liberal Silicon Valley dot-com boomer, (he's given exclusively to Democrats and Democrat causes), the group boasts that it, "works with the White House to organize policy discussions that focus on small business issues."  It's an advocate of greater government involvement in health care, and appears to have been founded specifically in order to promote that goal.  It examines reform proposals, but only those that increase government involvement.

There's nothing necessarily the matter with this.  Most groups claim to be "unbiased."  But only a biased paper would accept such claims at face value.