The NY Times' deceptive summary of yesterday's Clinton-Sanders debate

In In Democratic Debate, Hillary Clinton Challenges Bernie Sanders on Policy Shifts the NY Times summarized last night’s debate by saying “Hillary Clinton targeted Bernie Sanders’s electoral appeal with some of her strongest language yet in a debate on Sunday night, seizing on Mr. Sanders’s recent policy shifts on universal health care and gun control to try to undercut his image as an anti-political truth teller.”

Both the headline and the summary strike me as inaccurate. Benie Sanders has been pretty consistently in favor of single payer health care. (For example, in 2013 Sanders introduced the American Health Security Act, S. 1782 which required “each participating state to set up and administer a state single payer health program.”)

Probably the shift that the NY Times writers are referring to concerns the shift from Obamacare to a single payer system:

With Mr. Sanders gaining on her before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton cast herself as the defender of Mr. Obama’s record and Mr. Sanders as playing into Republican hands with proposals like replacing the Affordable Care Act with a single-payer plan, which Mr. Sanders describes as “Medicare for all.”

But if that’s the shift they’re referring to, it’s not a shift in Sanders’ position — the way he arguably has shifted his views on gun control — but rather a shift in the nation’s policies.

The New York Times needs better editing.