 |
Media Matters Asks Washington Post for Fair, Accurate Reporting on Health Care Reform |
 |
When it comes to important change that requires political action, success never seems to be easy. Consider womens’ suffrage, Social Security, the abolition of slavery, federal anti-discrimination laws (we’re not all the way there on these yet). Reactionaries opposed each of these measures, and made it incredibly difficult for liberals to achieve these basic norms we now take for granted.
I guess that achieving a modern, rational health care shouldn’t be any different–and it hasn’t been. It’s clear that there’s nothing easy about health care reform, despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly support substantial change to the health care system, including the so-called “public option”–the idea that a government insurance plan ought to compete with private insurers.
Why is it so hard to achieve something that most Americans support? Opponents of change are skillful marketers. While they may not have much to offer when it comes to substance, but they have proven skillful at crafting slogans that dominate debate–scary sounding terms like “socialized medicine” are trotted out at every turn.
Another thing opponents of what is essentially popular reform have going for them is the traditional media. Media Matters is shining a much-needed light on how this is playing out. As Media Matters points out, it’s not too much for us to ask that the media report accurately and fairly on health care reform. Unfortunately, things aren’t working out that way at the Washington Post. The Post’s Ceci Connolly recently wrote that Change Congress interim chief executive Adam Green was, in an interview, “hard pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan...” Green counters that Connolly didn’t ask him about the substance of the health care reform, she asked him about the politics, and when he gave her an answer on the political front, she wrote that he had failed to answer on the substance. (Media Matters also points out that it’s pretty easy to find an eloquent substantive argument for the public option, if that’s what Connolly was looking for–by leaving this out, she made it seem that there simply is no substantive argument for the public option).
I don’t think Connolly has any sinister motive–as Green put it, she simply doesn’t understand the debate over health care, and she falls back on comfortable, but inaccurate shibboleths: for example, she wondered why Green was “attacking [his] friends” by holding Senate Democrats accountable for taking money from insurance companies.
It may not fit Connolly’s script to acknowledge that not all Democrats are on the progressive side of the health care debate, but it happens to be reality. As she continues to cover this critical debate, I hope that she, and the Post, will give careful consideration to the serious questions Media Matters has raised about her reporting.
DISCUSSION
2 RESPONSES to “Media Matters Asks Washington Post for Fair, Accurate Reporting on Health Care Reform”