From the Center for Media and Democracy
The media analysis group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) issued an action alert September 22 titled "NYT Slams Single-Payer" that described lopsided reporting in a New York Times article about "Medicare for all," a form of a single-payer health care system.
FAIR noted that the article, titled "Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely", laid out a list of arguments against single-payer while failing to include any balancing responses from the option's supporters.
In explaining the slant, article author Katharine Seelye said she was trying to explain why Medicare-for-all was "not going anywhere." "I thought the substance of [single-payer] had been dealt with elsewhere many times," she said.
On October 13, Times public editor Clark Hoyt conceded that FAIR "had a point," and agreed that the article excluded the point of view of single-payer health care system supporters. FAIR said it finds Seelye's defense "alarming," and points out that the Times, like the rest of the corporate-owned media, has given the issue of single-payer health care "scant attention." ACTION:
Ask New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to have the Times run a piece devoted to the case for single-payer healthcare - Medicare for all. The public deserves to have the full story.
CONTACT:
New York Times
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
Phone: 212-556-7652
A media consumed with tracking Obama’s popularity has failed to educate the American citizenry about the key elements of the debate. Ask any 30 Americans to define Obama’s plans for subsidies, mandates, insurance exchanges, or the public option, and you’re likely to hear 30 different answers. That’s because the media has been reporting on health care issues as if gossiping about the conflicting personalities crowded in any high school cafeteria. Read it all at True Slant
Tuesday morning on NPR's "The Takeaway", they allowed a genuine "ringer" to make a flagrantly inflammatory case against health care reform. Host John Hockenberry presented a conversation with two people who were happy with their health coverage, one of whom was Lori Roman, described as "a 46-year-old non-profit executive and political conservative from Annapolis, Maryland." In fact, she is an activist against health care reform, as even a quick check on a link provided on the "Takeaway" website (although not in the audio), would have shown.
Mr. Hockenberry and "The Takeaway" failed to provide even minimal information on this person to allow the audience to understand that they were listening to an activist against health reform, not simply a person with insurance who was happy with her coverage. Instead, they allowed her to make a misleading argument that government involvement would impair the private coverage she enjoys.
Read more here.
Great article by David Swanson about how the media refuses to educate citizens about single-payer health insurance:
President Obama said last week:
“Now, the truth is that, unless you have a — what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody is automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual because there’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get health care, doesn’t bother getting health care, and then, unfortunately, when they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room and the rest of us have to pay for it.”
Another name for “what’s called a single-payer system” would be: healthcare as a human right, not a commodity to be purchased. Many humans have this right. They just aren’t Americans.
Obama’s mention of single-payer, in passing, as something that would be better than anything else, but something that mysteriously lies out of reach, is typical of the very few mentions of single-payer healthcare in the U.S. corporate media. One Boston Globe column by Jonathan Cohn supports single-payer. And a short op-ed, accompanied by two opposing op-eds, in the Los Angeles Times, was written by a Brit who wants to know what in the world is wrong with single-payer. He won’t find an answer in the U.S. media, which is barely even willing to explain what single-payer is. Read it all at The Public Record
Stupak, and the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, D-California, did their job. Why didn't the media do its? Why were the outrages uncovered by Stupak and Waxman un-covered by most of the media?
Maybe because the Obama White House drew the spotlight away from health care. They'd diverted the media to cover Obama's proposed reforms of the financial regulatory system. Clinton gave his health care address to the Congress on September 23, 1993. October was supposed to be "Health Care Month" in the White House, but so many other issues got in the way that he had just one public event focused on health care in the entire month -- just one.
I understand that Obama's White House team has to juggle a lot of issues; I've been there. And I'm sure the Obama financial reforms have merit. But if the president wants to pass his ambitious health care reform, he's going to have to put other, worthy, ideas on the back burner and shine the media spotlight on the plight of people like Robin Beaton. Read it all at CNN.com
Russell Mokhiber: Something is Rotten at PBS:
Last year, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid made a great documentary for the PBS show Frontline titled Sick Around the World.
Reid traveled to five countries that deliver health care for all – UK, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan – to learn about how they do it.
Reid found that the one thing these five countries had in common – none allowed for-profit health insurance companies to sell basic medical coverage.
They can sell for-profit insurance for extras – breast enlargements, botox, hair transplants.
But not for the basic health needs of the American people.
Instead, the film that aired Monday pushed the view that Americans be required to purchase health insurance from for-profit companies.
And the film had a deceptive segment that totally got wrong the lesson of Reid's previous documentary – Sick Around the World.
During that segment, about halfway through Sick Around America, the moderator introduces Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.
Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can't work here.
Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it's quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.
Moderator: That's what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.
But the hard reality, as presented by Reid in Sick Around the World, is quite different than Ignagni and the moderator claim.
Other countries do not require citizens buy health insurance from for-profit health insurance companies – the kind that Karen Ignagni represents.
In some countries like Germany and Japan, citizens are required to buy health insurance, but from non-profit, heavily regulated insurance companies.
And other countries, like the UK and Canada, don't require citizens to buy insurance. Instead, citizens are covered as a birthright – by a single government payer in Canada, or by a national health system in the UK.
The producers of the Frontline piece had a point of view – they wanted to keep the for-profit health insurance companies in the game.
TR Reid wants them out.
"We spent months shooting that film," Reid explains. "I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it."
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
"I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world," Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
"Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit," Reid said. "But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance."
"I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,"' Reid said.
Reid said that he now wants to make other documentaries, but not for Frontline.
“Frontline will never touch me a again – they are done with me,” Reid said.
Reid says that "it's perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy."
"We disagreed, and we parted ways," Reid says.
It might be perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy.
But it's not perfectly reasonable to mislead the American people on national television in the middle of a health care crises when Congress is shaping legislation that will mean life or death for the for-profit health insurance industry.
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