Another '60 Minutes' hit job on Social Security

CBS News and 60 Minutes love carrying water for Republicans in their ongoing war on Social Security. In the fall of 2013, it was Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) attack on Social Security disability, in which the news magazine presented an entire segment without talking to one single disabled person or disability advocate and declared that the program was "a secret welfare system ... ravaged by waste and fraud." In that case, the program previewed sham report Coburn was releasing. This weekend, they did it again, previewing a Senate hearing on the Social Security Administration's massive database, the "Death Master File," touting the possibilities for fraud and abuse if someone was either incorrectly reported dead or the converse, died and didn't show up on the file.

The LA Times' indispensable Michael Hiltzik details all the things that reporter Scott Pelley and 60 Minutes bungled in this story, errors that were compounded in the Senate hearing it previewed. Among them the basic starting point that this isn't the fault of the Social Security Administration, at all.

Numerous studies by its own inspector general and the Government Accountability Office suggest that for the Social Security Administration to verify every report it receives of 2.8 million American deaths per year would be a Herculean job.

Why? Because those reports arrive from thousands of sources of varying reliability across the country--funeral directors, family members, banks, Medicare and Veterans Affairs offices, post offices. Social Security considers the most reliable source to be electronic death records from the states, but only 35 states submit these to the agency. […] READ MORE