Time and The Hill magazines breathlessly reported the Meals on Wheels program has been slashed of all federal funding in the proposed budget on submitted to Congress by President Trump.
As Walter Olson of the none-too-Trump-friendly National Review objectively noted, the rush to judgement against Trump certainly “made for great copy — irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable.”
Only one problem — none of it’s true.
With a Time headline of “Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels” and The Hill garnering 26,000 shares online from their fake reporting, the Left-leaning media certainly thought they’d snagged the president on a rather large gotchya moment.
As reported;
But it was false. And it wouldn’t have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.
I started on the organization’s own website. From Thursday’s conversation in the press, it was easy to assume that block grant programs — CDBG and similar block grants for community services and social services — are the main source of federal funding for Meals on Wheels. Not so.
Instead, as the national site explains, the major source of federal funding for the programs, accounting for 35 percent of overall local budgets, comes through the Sixties-era Older Americans Act. (Local programs also obtain support from state and county governments, private donors, and so on.)
According to the website, cuts have not been announced in Older Americans Act funding, although the group fears that they may lie ahead.
Notice the key word in the last sentence is “may,” not “will.”
But I digress. Yet another screaming example of the MSM’s is the schizophrenic excuse of reporting, Gregory Korte of USA Today has as the caption of the article’s main photograph;
Meals on Wheels, the popular service that provides food to the elderly, faces a sharp funding cut under President Donald Trump’s budget proposal.
Curiously, the very first sentence in the article proper is;
President Trump’s first budget proposal to Congress last week specifically identified steep cuts to hundreds of domestic programs, but Meals on Wheels wasn’t one of them.
