CJR’s Greg Marx has a nice post up assessing the value of targeting professional health care dissembler Betsy McCaughey.

On the one hand, as he notes, she’s had a profoundly negative impact on mainstream debate and deserves to be “named and shamed” for her deceptions. For that reason, I’m happy to see TNR publishing a lengthy McCaughey takedown (especially given the magazine’s role in her rise to media stardom).

However, like Marx, I don’t see the value in bringing her on TV to berate her (as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan did). At some point, it’s time to move past McCaughey and think about the larger problem she represents, as Marx argues:

[P]utting McCaughey on TV does imply a certain legitimacy. Against that concern, what is the corresponding benefit, other than giving the host a chance to take a scalp?

By this point, any media outlet that’s been paying attention has made a decision about McCaughey’s credibility… The campaign against McCaughey has been welcome, but barring radical changes in the media environment, if we’re talking health care again in 2025, she’ll surely find an outlet for her claims again. The key is how the rest of the media responds.

This is the other danger, one that both Nyhan and Klein note—the possibility that by focusing on McCaughey personally, we may overlook the deeper patterns she has been able to exploit. As Klein writes, the problem is that “McCaughey isn’t just a liar. She’s an exciting liar”:

That’s not very helpful in the policy debate, but it’s very useful in the media debate… McCaughey might be something of a uniquely deceptive individual, but she’s taking advantage of a structural weakness in the system.

The upshot is that we need to address that “structural weakness”—not, at this point, keep competing to see who can do the best job of filleting McCaughey.