Broadcast Media Help Whitewash Romney's Olympics Record Lobbying For Taxpayer Money

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http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201250005

January 25, 2012 8:33 am ET by Leslie Rosenberg

February marks the 10th anniversary of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, an event that has become central to Mitt Romney's campaign for the White House -- a legacy marked by millions of dollars in lobbying and taxpayer spending that has been whitewashed from the story.

In recent weeks, as criticism has mounted over Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, media scrutiny has focused in part on how the company profited on private equity deals that were tied to massive federal bailouts, a record that contrasts with Romney's rhetoric on federal bailouts.

A January 6 Reuters article noted the conflict between Romney's campaign, which "has championed free markets and vowed to shrink the role of government" with Romney's own history at Bain and its "brush with a U.S. bailout" after the U.S. Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. was forced to "pony up $44 million to bail out" an underfunded pension plan at a company connected to Romney's tenure at Bain. Joe Conason explained:

The pension plan, which cut benefits drastically, would have gone under altogether without an infusion of $44 million from the federal government, despite many earlier warnings to the Bain managers that they were not providing sufficient funding for it.