Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (3/18/10) returns from his excursion into mocking right-wingers to return to his natural role of ridiculing single-payer advocates. His target today is Rep. Dennis Kucinich.  You know what's funny about him? He's short! Or, in Milbank's words, he's a "little man," a "little guy," a "diminutive figure" and--because he announced his support for the healthcare bill on St. Patrick's Day--a "leprechaun."

Actually, Kucinich is the exact same height--5 foot 7--as John McCain, whom Milbank can somehow write about without any elf jokes.

Milbank also includes a sneering reference to how Kucinich "led the city into default" when he was mayor of Cleveland. Yes, that's true--he stopped the plan to privatize the city's power system, which caused some banks to play hardball with the city's credit. He didn't blink, Cleveland still has municipal power and it saved the city and its residents tens of millions of dollars. It's hard to find many people in Cleveland who think Kucinich did the wrong thing.

But also... he's short! Like a leprechaun!

What most struck me as most strange, though, about Milbank's column was this line:

Our Kenyan Hawaiian commander in chief evidently has the luck of the Irish.

First of all, it's weird to refer to a president's state of birth as though it were an ethnicity. Who would anyone describe Bill Clinton as an Anglo Arkansan?  Ronald Reagan as an Irish Illinoisan? It's as if, like Cokie Roberts, Milbank doesn't really consider Hawaii to be part of the United States.

Secondly, Obama is part Irish on his mother's side--he's got Kearneys and McCurrys in his family tree.  But Milbank was apparently too struck by the hilarity of being "Kenyan Hawaiian" to look that up.

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/16/10):

What I'm about to tell you is simply stunning.

A new survey published by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious magazine, says that nearly half of primary care doctors in America could leave the medical profession if Obamacare is passed.

According to the Journal, 63 percent of physicians feel that healthcare reform is needed but should be done in a more gradual way. And an astounding 72 percent of doctors believe a public option, that is a government-run health insurance company, would have a negative impact on medical care in the USA.

Doctors hate the White House health plan--now that IS a story. And it's published in a reputable scientific journal!

Or not.

Anyone trying to find the research will likely see it first at a right-wing blog like Hot Air-- which linked to a New England Journal of Medicine "Career Center" website article that was actually the employment newsletter Recruiting Physicians Today. That this was not the journal itself would have been obvious to anyone reading the site.

The survey was done by the Medicus Firm, a "nationally retained physician search firm." The main point of their poll is that health reform will create some kind of uncertainty, which  means the "strongest physician recruiters and firms will be in demand"-- i.e., themselves.

After Media Matters investigated the matter, the New England Journal of Medicine posted an explanation on their site, explaining that the advertiser newsletter is not the journal, and they had nothing to do with the survey (which, it turns out, appears to have been an email survey of doctors in the firm's database).

After leading his show with a bogus tale, surely Bill O'Reilly will correct the record tonight. Right?

In a February 28 piece headlined, "Obama Ready to Move Forward on Healthcare Reform," the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut closed on a rather odd note:

Republicans have expressed growing confidence heading into the midterm elections, with healthcare as a potential campaign tool. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele took the argument a step further, saying after the Thursday summit that it had been "a death panel for Obama-care."

"If that wasn't enough, when you come out of this thing and you're looking at the reconciliation fight that may loom ahead of us, it certainly will have represented a death panel for the Democrats this fall," Steele said on CNN.

Death panels became part of the debate last summer, after prominent Republicans, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, claimed the government would set them up to decide who could live or die.

Is the assumption here that everyone knows that there were never any death panels in any healthcare bill? When the leader of a major party is still making references to them, it deserves some sort of corrective from a journalist.  The Post reminds readers where the lie came from--but not that it's a lie.

Why are liberals and Democrats losing on issues like healthcare? Columnist E.J. Dionne  (Washington Post, 2/18/10) rightly points out that congressional Democrats have caved on almost every big issue: "Single-payer was out at the start. The public option died. A Medicare buy-in died." He wonders:

While liberals were arguing about public plans and this or that, and while Obama was deep into inside deal-making, the conservatives relentlessly made a straightforward public case based on a syllogism: The economy is a mess. Obama and the Democrats are for big government. Big government is responsible for the mess. Therefore the mess is the fault of Obama and the Big Government Democrats.

Simplistic and misleading? Absolutely. But if liberals and Obama are so smart, how did they--or, if you prefer, "we"--allow conservatives to make this argument so effectively? Why do the mainstream media give it so much credence?

That last question is really the answer. Conservative misinformation is effective when the media allow it to be effective. It's a pretty easy formula. The best part is that the right can take up all that space in the media debate and still complain about the media's liberal bias.

AP's Calvin Woodward, who has the standing assignment of  "factchecking" political speeches, continues to be an embarrassment to genuine factcheckers everywhere--substituting his own weird value judgments, semantic games and crystal-ball gazing for genuine examination of facts (FAIR Blog, 10/30/08, 2/25/09, 4/30/09).  In his post-State of the Union effort (1/27/10), he singles out Barack Obama's call for a non-military discretionary spending freeze, pointing out that during the 2008 campaign Obama had said that rival John McCain's proposal for a spending freeze was "using a hatchet where you need a scalpel." Saying that Obama's "proposal is similar to McCain's," Woodward complained that "he didn't explain what had changed."

Actually, regardless of what you think of the freeze proposal, the administration has explained quite specifically how the two proposals are supposed to differ: While McCain's "hatchet" would freeze funding for individual programs, Obama's "scalpel" would freeze overall domestic discretionary spending, allowing some programs to expand while others are cut (White House Blog, 1/26/10).  Again, you can question the wisdom of the policy, but you can't claim that the White House doesn't offer an explanation of how Obama's approach differs from McCain's. Or rather, if you work for AP, you not only can--you can make it the centerpiece of your "factchecking" article. (The article's headline is a pun about Obama's "Hatchet' Job.")

Woodward indulges in fortune-telling when he dismisses Obama's talk of creating a deficit-cutting commission as a "weak substitute" for a congressionally established panel: "Any commission set up by Obama alone would lack authority to force its recommendations before Congress, and would stand almost no chance of success."  Actually, Nostradamus, the Senate plan for a deficit commission would have required three-fifths majorities in both houses to enact the recommendations (McClatchy, 1/26/10),  proposals that came from a White House-created panel could pass by majority rule (since deficit-cutting measures fall under the Senate's reconciliation rules)--a far easier political hurdle.  (Once more, the question of whether such "success" is to be hoped for is another matter--see FAIR Action Alert, 1/6/10.)

Woodward follows Obama's "Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan" with the retort, "But Obama can't guarantee people won't see higher rates or fewer benefits in their existing plans." Because an honest president would have pointed out, apparently, that his or her reform bill wouldn't permanently eliminate all medical inflation.

The lead in an article in today's New York Times (1/26/10) tells us that the White House and Congressional Democrats will soon decide "whether to use a procedural maneuver" to pass a healthcare bill with less than 60 votes in the Senate. That process is called budget reconciliation; it would be a complicated process, to be sure,  and as the Times tells us "it carries numerous risks, including the possibility of a political backlash against what Republicans would be sure to cast as parliamentary trickery."

Well yes, they could indeed say that--and reporters will type it into stories. As the article elaborates: "Republicans, however, have made clear that they will portray Mr. Obama and Democrats as trying to use a hardball tactic to win passage of the healthcare legislation." That was followed by a quote from Republican Rep. John Boehner, who lambasted the administration's "job-killing policies."

Read further, though, and you come to this: "The mere mention of reconciliation infuriates many Republicans, even though they occasionally used the tactic when they were in the majority."

Wait--what was that last part again? Republicans are infuriated by a tactic they used when they were in power? Isn't that hypocrisy a little more important than boilerplate GOP complaints?

This article has a familiar feel. In fact, the problem here was the problem with another Times article eight months ago, written by Robert Pear--a co-author of today's piece.  As I pointed out then, Pear called reconciliation "obscure" and "high-risk," before adding, almost as an aside: "The fast-track procedures have been used 19 times since 1980 to pass major legislation, including much of President Ronald Reagan’s domestic policy agenda in 1981, welfare overhaul in 1996 and President George W. Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003."

There was little protest from the corporate media to passing tax cuts for the wealthy using reconciliation. Healthcare reform, for some reason, is treated differently.

Once again, the New York Times is setting up a false debate over healthcare policy, contrasting White House-style "pragmatism" with left-wing "ideology." The lead of Sheryl Gay Stolberg's piece today (12/18/09):

In the great healthcare debate of 2009, President Obama has cast himself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, willing to compromise in exchange for votes. Now ideology -- an uprising on the Democratic left -- is smacking the pragmatic president in the face.

In this worldview, "ideologues" are those who push for reforms--including single-payer--that they believe will lower costs and offer more comprehensive coverage. "Pragmatists," meanwhile, are moving in the opposite direction, toward higher costs and less coverage, in order to theoretically win the political support of some conservative lawmakers.

Using language like this doesn't tell you much about the debate in Washington, but it speaks volumes about where the New York Times is coming from.

Yesterday's Washington Post (12/16/09) reports that the public isn't sold on healthcare reform. As the headline puts it:

Public Cooling to Healthcare Reform as Debate Drags On, Poll Finds

The story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen explains that "there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in healthcare now under consideration." Now, how "comprehensive" the reforms under consideration are is certainly debatable, but these conclusions seem to be drawn from questions about costs and Barack Obama's handling of the issue.

But the Post did ask other, more interesting questions--and then buried the results. Deep into the article we learn that "more than six in 10 favor expanding Medicare to people ages 55 to 64 who lack insurance--a proposal included in one Senate compromise effort that appears unlikely to survive final negotiations." In the next graph, readers are told:

On the issue of whether and how to expand coverage to those who do not have it, 36 percent favor a government plan to compete with private insurers, 30 percent prefer private plans coordinated by the government and 30 percent want the system to remain intact.

As with the so-called Medicare "buy-in," this finding of strong support for a public option suggests that the public is much more supportive of fundamental health care changes than the Congress or White House. In other words, the public isn't really "cooling" to health care reform;  they want more than the politicians are likely to deliver.

Washington Post columnist David Broder rounds up some "non-partisan" budget experts-- one of whom, oddly enough, was John McCain's Social Security adviser during his 2000 campaign -- to agree with him that the Democrats' healthcare bills are too expensive.  He closes with this:

The challenge to Congress -- and to Obama -- remains the same: Make the promised savings real, and don't pass along unfunded programs to our children and grandchildren.

This advice would be easier to take from someone who didn't just write that Obama should escalate the Afghanistan war because of the "urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right." Good thing that war doesn't cost anything-- or that if it does, our grandchildren won't mind paying for it.

A headline in today's Los Angeles Times (11/20/09): "Democrats Risk Taxing the Wealthy for Healthcare."

The paper explains:

Embracing the progressive--and sometimes politically risky--principle that the cost of carrying out public policies should fall to the well-off more than the disadvantaged, both the House and Senate bills would place new taxes on the wealthy to help pay for expanded insurance coverage.

Since mostly people aren't "well-off," and raising taxes on the wealthy tends to be rather popular with most people, what exactly is the political risk here? Surely the article will tell us. Oh, here it is:

In a recent Associated Press poll, 57 percent of those surveyed favored taxing people who earn more than $250,000 a year to pay for the healthcare overhaul. Of a variety of financing options tested in the survey, that tax was the only idea supported by a majority.

In other words, the not-very-risky idea of raising taxes on the wealthy.

The remarkable ability to engage in in-depth discussion of lawmakers' opposition to healthcare reform efforts without ever mentioning the massive contributions such lawmakers tend to receive from the healthcare industry is not confined to the Washington Post--as Dan Ward noted in his Extra! piece (11/09).  Another recent example of the phenomenon was provided by the New York Times, which ran a piece (11/18/09) on three Democratic senators --Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas--who may help filibuster the reform bill to death.

The piece, by Carl Hulse, informs us that the three "have all been skeptical of a public health insurance option," and that all "represent states won handily last year by Sen. John McCain."  An accompanying chart provides more data:  when they each were first elected and when they're next up for re-election; their margin of victory in their last race and their state's presidential results in 2004 and 2008; the population and median income of their states; and what percentage of their constituents are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid or are uninsured.

The implication is that these figures might help readers better understand these senators' stances on healthcare reform.  But one obvious potential influence goes unmentioned: the money these politicians get from healthcare interests.  For Nelson, the figure $664,000 in the 2005-10 election cycle; for  Landrieu, it's $615,000;  and for Lincoln, $763,000.

By providing readers with information about state residents' income and health insurance status, and leaving out the sums contributed by health interests, the Times is suggesting that the politicians take their voters' interests into account and ignore their own.  If that sounds like the kind of politicians you're familiar with, then you're likely to find the Times' coverage of the politics of healthcare reform highly informative.

The headline and lead of a New York Times piece today:

Trick for Democrats Is Juggling Ideology and Pragmatism
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON -- Democrats have displayed a striking degree of pragmatism in seeking to push the health care bill through Congress, embracing or rejecting ideological considerations as needed to keep the legislation moving.

By "ideology," the Times means policy ideas that are popular with voters and that would be more likely to reduce the costs of the healthcare system and cover more people (single-payer, a truly robust public plan). By "pragmatism," they mean the things that are less likely to reduce costs, or the trade-offs Democratic leaders have made in an attempt to win conservative support (excluding coverage for abortion services, for example). The choice of such language is intended to send a political message about what policy ideas are wise, and which are not--based on ideology, not pragmatism.

In the Washington Post (10/25/09), reporter Dan Balz has a piece about the "resurrection" of the public option in the Senate negotiations over healthcare reform. But like the Post's trumpeting of its recent poll on the issue, Balz's rationale doesn't make much sense. As he sees it, Senate Democrats "reevaluated the politics of the public option" in part because support was on the rise:

Then last week, new polls, one from the Washington Post and ABC News and the other from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, found clear majority support (57 percent) for a public option. The Post/ABC News poll showed support had risen five percentage points since August. The new numbers emboldened public-option supporters to press harder, even though the same polls continued to show the public divided over the overall shape of healthcare legislation.

As we pointed out already, the Post's numbers weren't all that revelatory; the public option was popular before (with as much as 62 percent support in a June 18-21 Post/ABC poll) and continues to be popular. As for the Kaiser numbers Balz singles out, that poll did find 57 percent support this month; however, the month before (9/11-18/09), Kaiser found the public option supported by 59 percent.

Figuring out why the press is pushing this "public option comeback" storyline is difficult to fathom, but it's undeniable that it is being sold with misleading citations of public opinion.

The Washington Post reports today (10/19/09) on its new poll on healthcare reform. The headline is straightforward enough: "Public Option Gains Support: Clear Majority Now Backs Plan." But it's not clear there's much news here.

The public option has 57 percent support in the new poll. In the last poll (one month ago--9/10-12/09), it got 55 percent support. As the story points out further down, support was at 62 percent before all the town halls. It's a reminder that while the media have given a whole lot of time to critics of public insurance options in general, the public remains surprisingly supportive of the concept.

But it's even more important to remember that the last time the Post wrote up their poll results (9/14/09), they seemed eager to stress the unpopularity of the public option. Just look at the headline:  "Reform Opposition Is High but Easing: More Support if Public Option Dropped."

Apparently the two-point swing in the poll means a lot; something supported by 57 percent of people is popular, while the same thing supported by a mere 55 percent should be jettisoned.

A bit of NBC Nightly News last night, from reporter Mike Viqueria:

But now Mr. Obama faces more friendly fire. After a key committee passed a plan to pay for reform with a tax on high-cost policies, major unions, normally Obama allies, took out full-page newspaper ads complaining that the tax will hit labor hardest and vowing that, without changes, they say, "We will oppose it." And late last night opposition from a more familiar foe, Sarah Palin posting on her Facebook page and echoing insurance industry claims that the latest plan will mean higher premiums, writing, "Unintended consequences always result from top-down big government plans." After being blindsided by insurance industry attacks, the president hit back.

If you were a reporter trying to determine whose views on healthcare to include in the few seconds of time allotted for your story, would you really include a Facebook posting from the former governor of Alaska? Single-payer activists have to get arrested to try and make the news, but Sarah Palin just needs to type.