A curious mention in the Politico today:
One of the summer’s surprises has been the degree to which angry “town halls” filled with opponents of healthcare reform has driven the political narrative– no matter that Democrats own both the White House and Congress, no matter that many news organizations were slow to reckon with the consequences of a movement gathering power far from the traditional corridors of power.
Whatever your impression of those town hall events, it’s hard to conclude that the media were “slow to reckon” with them. They were blasted all over television, after all.
When Tom Rosensteil of the Project for Excellence in Journalism appeared on the PBS NewsHour on August 31 to talk about the press and health policy, he noted that his group’s studies found that “the protests have gotten more coverage, actually, than description of the healthcare plans, or — and twice as much coverage as the stories about the state of the healthcare system.” He later elaborated:
What, really, I think, surprises me in the coverage is how little coverage there is of how our healthcare system works, what’s wrong with what — what’s wrong with it, and what the alternatives could be, based on other countries, other systems, alternative programs in the United States.
That represents only 8 percent of all the coverage that we have seen this year, vs. 55 percent about the political horse races and battles over this, and another 16 percent of the coverage on the protests.
So the guy’s a media analyst and he’s *surprised* by this?
Golly, Mister Wizard – hasn’t this been SOP for the corpress since Hector was a pup?
One of the summer’s surprises has been the degree to which angry “town halls” filled with opponents of healthcare reform has driven the political narrative–
wtf is this clown talking about?
Of course it has driven the narrative. Screaming ass-clowns waving automatic weapons at the president will do that, imho. Indeed, I think that that’s what it was supposed to do.
And to drive serious discussions, in which the manifest failures and weaknesses of the existing system off the front pages where, given the tragedies they represented, they well might have appeared if the SoCalledUnbiasedMedia had NOT been providing admiring, sometimes adoring stages for the screaming cretins of the Right.
Check the interlocking boardrooms of the corporations which own and operate the media and the corporations their reporters are supposedly covering. That’s why the political narrative went the way it did…
I think the attention given to the town hall meetings is deserved, but it shouldn’t happen at the expense of covering the actual topic of health care reform. The anger at town hall meetings is representative of individual citizens who are sick of watching their government do whatever it wants with taxpayer money without paying heed to our desires, our questions and concerns. It was only a matter of time before things became so corrupt in Washington that people would start standing up like this and taking their government back from the embedded Washington elite.
At the same time, the current issue that’s driving all this, health care, remains largely ambiguous to people who actually want to learn about details of the bill. Instead we are being forced to rely on the opinions of agenda-driven politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle to tell us what the bill means, when we can’t trust any of them to tell us the truth anymore. They’re always going to bend it their way– the right will frame Obamacare as a socialist monstrosity, the left will idolize it and frame the protesters as lunatics. Same old, same old… and it’s not even politicians anymore who do this, but members of the media who have also lost any sense of objectivity.
Honestly, I blame President Obama for a lot of the ambiguity. He wanted to railroad this bill through Congress in two weeks– something that is probably the biggest piece of social reform legislation in more than a generation– so he deliberately went light on details. He also let Congress draft the bills, so he didn’t have much to stand on when people started asking for details because there were either none to be had, or no one knew what they were (since 95% of our elected officials didn’t read the bill).
If the President wanted to be straight with the American people, he should have proposed his own bill from the outset, taken his time to understand all of its proposals and implications, and been prepared to clearly and concisely communicate to voters just what he wanted to do. Instead he played the same old political shadow games we’ve seen for years, and now it may very well end up costing Americans the chance for needed health care reform. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.