Health care debate makes TV ill: Shape up media!

By GottaLaff

Paddy and I were ranting to each other just now as we chatted on the phone. The direction the corporate media have taken the so-called coverage of the health care debate is insulting, and sorely lacking.

Just this minute, I heard MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell ask, "Who's winning the health care wars? We'll discuss that when we come back." (paraphrased) How about informing instead of baiting, promoting your next segment, Andrea?

Even the "On the Media" columnist for the Calendar section of the L.A. Times has taken notice:

But if you were watching CNN on Tuesday about the time that Baucus mentioned instituting a cost-control commission he called a "Med-Pac on steroids," you quickly found yourself whisked back to the studio. The senator had gotten into messy details, "a little bit in the weeds," as CNN anchor Tony Harris said.

Yes, that's right. Processing actual information was too difficult for CNN. That kind of thing might require the anchors to make a, you know, effort to, you know, educate their audience.

Rather than try to explain to its viewers how such a commission might control Medicare costs, CNN cut away to an all-important update on . . . Alberto Contador's ongoing war of words with fellow cyclist Lance Armstrong.

By all means, let's recap the story of two big-name jocks man-slapping each other, rather than help Americans sort out the central domestic issue (Snore!) of the moment.

There it is, right there. The news models blow us bubbles of distraction that pop one after the other, right in our collective faces. Business as usual. They feed us gulps of sound bitey news snacks, and the real stories get swatted away like annoying mosquitoes. Celebrity gossip and cynical political spin are what garner ratings, so they become our force-fed diet.

They have transformed the story of how to fix an overpriced and inadequate care system into an overheated political scrum, with endless chatter about deadlines and combatants and very little about the kind of medical care people get and how it might change.

Campaign-style "horse race" coverage seemed to me to have shoved aside more pertinent reporting

This is exactly what took place during the 2008 election. Remember?

[L]ess than one quarter of the coverage centered on current medical care conditions, the details of reform proposals or the effect of healthcare on the larger economy. [...]

The complexity of the debate has not been lost on anyone, but even accepting the difficulties, many outlets have shown a dazzling determination to highlight conflicts and legislative timetables while telling us almost nothing about potential changes in insurance and care.

Many outlets have obsessed, in particular, over the likelihood that the legislation would not be settled by this week's congressional recess. [...]

Fox News, not surprisingly, seems most intent on reporting on the potential failure of President Obama to make this week's deadline, which he set himself. [...]

Both the president and reporters covering the story need to do just what CNN avoided Tuesday and get down in the weeds. [...]

Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA healthcare spokesman-turned-consumer advocate, [said] that reporters routinely fail to assess the huge "costs to society and the economy if reform is not enacted."

That would go a long way toward putting the current debate in Congress in perspective. But it would still leave a gaping hole in much of the media coverage -- caused by the failure to investigate practices around the rest of the world, particularly European-style, single-payer programs. [...]

I suspect some in the big media have tiptoed lightly on that turf for the same reason as the politicians. Better to appear ill-informed about the world of healthcare than to appear open to anything, you know, French.

Absolument! Nailed it.