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The Rocky Mountain News’s coverage of John McCain’s campaign stop in Denver last week raises an important issue for reporters, especially those covering the election: Do you let a candidate’s remarks stand unchallenged even if they are wrong or misleading?
McCain had come to town to talk mostly about health care, the paper reported, noting that the topic took up a large part of his hour-long speech. The News offered all too typical coverage of such talks, however—bits and pieces on a lot of topics, with quotes here and there. We do learn that on health care, McCain urged states to take a leadership role in reform, and that he pumped his tax credit aimed at helping Americans buy health insurance. In the next graph, the paper said that McCain’s rationale for the tax credits “is that making major reforms and using government to work through the problem will affect the quality of coverage for Americans—which he called the best in the world.”
The best health care in the world? McCain has asserted that before and so have other politicians. No doubt we will hear it again. But the evidence says otherwise. The Commonwealth Fund, which each year compares the U.S. system to those of other countries, has found serious shortcomings in the American way of health care. Among other things the study concludes that “The U.S. health system is the most expensive in the world, but comparative analyses consistently show the United States underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance,” including quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. “Among the six nations studied—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last.” The study provides a great deal of detail.
Meanwhile, a large proportion of voters are beginning to question the quality of our nation’s health care system, presumably based on their experience. A while back the Harvard School of Public Health and Harris Interactive polled voters and found only 45 percent said that they consider the U.S. health care system the best in the world. Thirty-nine percent said other countries have better systems, and 15 percent said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question. (The poll also found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe the U.S. system was the best).
So McCain’s statement—which he repeats often, and which has the effect of suggesting that serious reform may be uneceessary, or that it could cause more harm than good—needs to be tested in the media, and often.
Earlier this week the New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, who hears from hundreds of readers every day, told journalism students at Baruch College in New York that “readers are looking for history, context, and analysis.” In this case, the Rocky Mountain News sure didn’t give its readers any of that. I asked Hoyt, who for many years was an editor for Knight-Ridder, whether journalists should set the record straight when candidates omit the real story. “There should be more of that,” he said and offered a reason why it’s often not done. “A newspaper will report something once, and think they’ve already done that. But new people are coming to you all the time. Some things you need to keep repeating.”
John McCain’s campaign canard
Presidential candidates know that repetition works, and that’s why we hear the same words and themes in speech after speech—McCain and his best-in-the-world health care; Clinton and her use of “universal coverage”; Obama saying he never takes money from lobbyists. They know that if voters hear the same message often enough, they will believe it, even if it is less than true.
Journalists must also repeat, therefore. We must add history, context, and analysis, and when something is flat-out wrong, we should say so. The topic of American health care quality is a good place to start. And to repeat.
By Trudy Lieberman
Popularity: 1% [?]
I agree with the article on health care– we do have a bad system, not too many people know how bad, and the changes needed are not being discussed nearly enough– and the media must take part of the blame.
However, when people talk about what a lousy job the media does, they often begin with the assumption that journalists mean well– like when Hoyt a former editor, says that journalists say something once and then think they have done their job and don’t have to repeat. That doesn’t explain why we are overdosed on celebrity trivia. The media don’t appear to mind repeating that.
Let’s face it, the media DONT mean well– they are owned by the Establishment, they act as the mouthpiece of the Establishment and they attack anything that threatens it–like Obama.
Look at recent Obama coverage. The media have performed exactly as you would expect: they took the most outrageous attacks on Obama, amplified them, and discussed them to death. They naturally did not try to put anything in context or discover the truth. They showed very little footage of what Obama actually said– most of the footage was people commenting on Obama, usually his critics. I especially like their trick of assigning motivation — as though they were privy to the mental functioning of Obama (or whoever is the current target).
I am sick of the way the media trivialize everything, the ABC debate was typical — half of OUR time was wasted on stupid trivial questions, while important ones never get asked. Which of course is the point, not the accidental outcome.
I hope to goodness that we don’t have to suffer through the same witless garbage during the next election. We should at least take the debates out of the hands of the networks and give it to some organization with intelligence and no ax to grind–like the League of Women Voters– and broadcast on Public TV and C-SPAN, not a commercial channel.
We have third world medical care for the poor. Fifty million people go to ERs or street medics, wise women,herbalists, Chinese Doctors,EMTs, ex beanie medics, doggie docs, all sorts of healers other than MDs.
Cuba has this country beat when it comes to helping the sick and injured. I even knew a do it yourself dentist. In Colorado in some areas the poor let their teeth rot out. This is turn of the century North America, what do you expect health care?
Stop buying the products behind these so called media people. Don’t by anything the last day of each month, where a bandana to let others know you are protesting all of the lying and cheating that is happening to the people of this country. Do something!
NPR and Public Television should be fully funded by the government. That was the way it was set up. Who cut it back to near zero? The Republicans?
Trudy Lieberman has put a finger here on the DOA pulse of a defunct media.
Whether one understands the role of media as defending individual’s rights or more narrowly as one of requiring the reporter to challenge or even correct errors in unattested facts, unaccountable value attitudes or false science, to fail to mention Mr. McCain’s myths as “myths” not truths is to cede the arena of nonfiction to postmdodernists: to those who warp, deny, evade or replace the real so as to inculcate an annunciated replacement universe in the minds of their brainwashed victims.
This is the missing link among pseudo-religious pretensions to inspired revelation played out in thisworld where manifestly such otherworldly ideas can never work, criminal actions against victims of fraud and totalitarian public-interest-excused lawmaking compelling victims to do and not do, say they believe or don’t believe and pay and receive what at gunpoint they’re compelled to concede.
I noticed this lie by Mr. McCain during a debate, and have written about it in a number of op-ed responses. I used it as the centerpiece of my objections to the repetitions of slanders, lies, false motivation assertions and failures to apply scientific standards to coverage of all candidates.
We must have regulations governing the form of non-fictional and visual utterances/transmissions emitted by those legally permitted to conduct “news”, write book, etc.
These regulations I say must apply to separating, categorically, attested facts from myths, standards based evaluations from unaccounted attitudes pro or con (and access to the legal use of value terms), and full scientific assertion as versus unsupported beliefs.
The commenter who noted that public-monopoly news media bosses and minions do “not mean well” got it right; Ms. Lieberman did not. When newsmen fail to apply standards of realism to the words of political candidates, officeholders or spokesmen or any description, they are aiding and abetting crimes, not merely doing an unprofessional level of reporting.
In the present crisis, with the Constitution being ignored by one party and misunderstood by the other equally Medieval pseudo-religious party, this one problem becomes critical: We are not seeking as a government to improve a good-enough Constitution; rather the reforms we must seek now are manifestly those needed to restore liberty to responsible citizen individuals and to take totalitarian powers away from out-of-control advocates of imperial presidential dictatorship (by decree, fraud, dirty tricks, stealth and worse).
Until we can remove money bribers and malfeasance by media tsars and their aides from our political process, we can never again have an election–just as we have had no meaningful election this time, again.
A contest wherein slander, irrelevant trivia, outward appearances and false definitions trump truth everywhere–with no non-fictional personnel to act as umpires, nor Federal election commissioners worth the name, nor judicial protectors acting for truth tellers, honest minds are left in the position of solitary whistle-blowers being pitted against a government and a media of criminal malefactors
Look what happened to the candidacies John Edwards, and Joseph Biden on the Democratic side alone. They were slandered, ignored and buried in an avalanche of unaccountable funds showered on two “leading candidates”–”leading” before a word had been spoken, an approbation had been sought, a mental credential had ever been checked or not checked…
This is not election coverage it is self-evident treason–and look at who is making the most of it. Certainly not reform candidates nor honest citizens.
Our healthcare system costs about twice as much as anyone else’s, routinely denies coverage at first asking in the hopes the patient will go away, give up or die, and massively overpays drug corporation ‘tsars’, medical organizatiion ‘tsars’ and paper pushing beureaucrats while starving nurses and cheating patients out of billions and billions of dollars a year. There’s your story, reporters.
The “best health care system in the world”? If you can’t report Mr. McCain’s lie, then what will be his or anyone else’s next lie? “The world’s greatest economy?”, “we have more liberty than any other nation’s citizens?” or “our educational system is the greatest?” How about, “This is the greatest country?”
By what possible standard?
Grow up or die, citizens. Remember, these lies are what you will die of–the big lie; repeated statist- postmodernist untruths, and the motives and crimes of those who countenance them in order to seize more and more power, over you–your lives,’your liberties and your pursuit of whatever little happiness remains possible to you under such a covert and increasingly overt tyranny.
Is this what you want?
Isn’t this what public newsmen are permitted to want–and to abet?
Written by veteran media critic and Emmy winner Rory O'Connor, Shock Jocks features unsparing profiles of the ten worst conservative radio talkers in America, including Michael Savage, Bill O' Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus and the rest.

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