Apparently the good folks over at Politico.com forgot, momentarily, that nothing ever really goes away on the internet.
It was originally noted on Twitter, but has now been documented with screenshots on Twitchy.com that the headline “Poor attendance at Obamacare event in Virginia” has been changed to “Obamacare message war goes local.” The URL for the story even echoes the old headline: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/obamacare-event-attendance-virginia-95172.html
Granted, the second headline is more neutral and journalists are supposed to avoid bias, it’s interesting that there is no note in the story itself about the change of headline. Another tenet of good journalism is that corrections should be noted.
If this was really journalists trying to avoid bias, you’d expect them to either not run the first headline at all, or note the change of headline in a correction notice in the story. Since neither of those happened, it definitely appears that someone decided the original headline made Obama and/or ObamaCare look bad, and did what they could to soften that impression. Whether that person was at Politico or in the White House is something we may never know.