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.

In a story about the Senate Finance Committee voting down two amendments that would have added a public option to the committee's healthcare bill, New York Times reporters Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes (9/29/09) write, "The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana."

The Times just had a poll that found 65 percent of respondents were in favor of a public option, with just 26 percent opposed.  To call the approach favored by the rightmost one-quarter of public opinion "middle-of-the-road"--well, maybe someone ought to take away Pear and Calmes' car keys and call them a cab.

Conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana unveiled his long-awaited health reform proposal yesterday, the results of weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee's so-called "Gang of Six"--three Democrats from the right-wing of their party and three moderate-to-conservative Republicans. The bill (unsurprisingly) does not include a public option and could end up leaving middle-income Americans paying too much for health insurance (Think Progress, 9/15/09). At the same time, no Republican--including those in the Baucus' Gang--has indicated that they intend to vote for this bill.

But some of the early media coverage seems to find it encouraging that the Baucus bill pleases almost no one. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly presents that view today ("From Finance Chief, a Bill That May Weather the Blows"), with the lead: "On the surface, it appears that no one is happy with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.)--and that may be the best news President Obama has had in months."

What exactly is the good news? Connolly explains that liberals unions "fumed," but more importantly, "the fragile coalition of major industry leaders and interest groups central to refashioning the nation's $2.5 trillion health-care system remains intact." These "influential players" have not found "reasons to kill the effort." Quite the opposite: "Most enticing was the prospect of 30 million new customers." Well, that is good news--if you happen to believe that pleasing health insurance companies is the key to passing meaningful reform of that industry. Here you see the worldview of the Washington Post in action.

Meanwhile, USA Today's front page headline in the print edition (9/17/09) is "Bill Seen as Step in the 'Right Direction.'" This is a strange conclusion to reach about a bill that no one seems to like. The "right direction" comment was made by Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican included in Baucus' Gang of Six, who the paper tells us isn't even sure she'll support the Baucus plan anyway. On their website USA Today has changed the headline to read, "Bill Elates Few but Seen as Progress"-- an improvement, but still a strange way to describe the state of the debate. Unless, of course, one sees Max Baucus, Olympia Snowe or the insurance industry as the most important voices in that debate.

While within the power-friendly environs of the corporate-funded Newseum, congressmembers John D. Rockefeller IV, Tim Pawlenty and Mary L. Landrieu probably felt pretty good about their ability to field such softballs from ABC's George Stephanopoulos as "What's the problem with the public health option?"

But upon leaving corporate TV's criticism-free zone, where such lies as Rockefeller's statement that "Medicare is gonna start going broke in 2017, which is like the day after tomorrow," pass completely unchallenged, they each were questioned by real-life journalist Sam Husseini of WashingtonStakeout.com (9/15/09).

Compare the treatment described above with Husseini's calm but determined questioning of the pols:

Sam Husseini: Health insurance mandates--don't they end up being a subsidy for the insurance companies, because you're mandating that people go out and buy their product?

Mary Landrieu: ...I'm not carrying water for the insurance companies....

SH: You say you're not carrying water, but your No. 1 contributor is JP Morgan Chase, PACs and individuals associated.... And you've precluded the Medicare-for-all type option. Why shouldn't somebody conclude that you are doing the bidding of the financial industry?

And to Rockefeller's platitude, "Don't worry about the insurance companies. Believe me, we're going to take care of them," Husseini responds in a most un-Stephanopoulos manner:

You say not to worry about the insurance companies, but even though you obviously come from a very wealthy family, you've raised money for your campaigns--the No. 1 sector, according to Open Secrets, is finance and insurance. Why shouldn't it be seen that a lot of people in Congress are in effect doing the bidding of the insurance companies?

The New York Times (9/13/09) attempted to fact check a Barack Obama speech on healthcare. By all appearances, this is in the regular, non-satirical edition of the paper:

Mr. Obama opened his 40-minute speech with what he called "disturbing news": a report from the Treasury Department that, he said, "found that nearly half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next 10 years” and that “more than one-third will go without coverage for longer than one year."

In fact, that is not precisely what the department found when it analyzed data from a University of Michigan survey that tracked the health insurance status of more than 17,000 Americans from 1997 to 2006.

The survey found that 47.7 percent had lost coverage at some point during those 10 years for one month or more, and that 36 percent lacked coverage for at least one year during that time, though not necessarily 12 months consecutively. Mr. Obama extrapolated those statistics to predict what might happen in the future.

Critics say that the president, who has deplored the "scare tactics" of his opponents, is now employing scare tactics of his own.

Huh. In case you didn't follow that: Obama cited a study with some striking numbers on workers losing their health insurance. That's indeed what the study found....  BUT, explains the Times, his presentation is misleading because the future could be radically different from the very recent past. Or as Dean Baker put it, "President Obama was making extrapolations about the future based on the past. Next thing he'll be telling us that black is white and night is day. This is why we need an independent media."

A September 7 Washington Post report on Japanese healthcare claims that "more than one-third of the workers' premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor." Which Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/7/09) understatedly calls "a striking statement":

Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don't have house fires to people who do. Car insurance transfers money from people who don't have car accidents to people who do. This is the basic concept of insurance. It protects people from bad events, transferring money from people who don't have bad events to those who do. In other words, this quote is telling us that Japan's health insurance system is operating like a health insurance system.

The article is also quick to tell readers that Japan's system may be unsustainable. Its subhead is: "Aging population could strain system." It is worth noting that Japan's population is already far older than the U.S. population.

"If the United States had the same age distribution as Japan," writes Baker, "its healthcare costs would almost certainly already be above 20 percent of GDP, compared to the current 17 percent." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Healthcare Reform" (8/14/09).

What "surprises" Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik (8/30/09) more than this summer's news full of "baroque conspiracy theories" and "weepy hysteria" is "the idea that these are somehow unprecedented."

Hiltzik looks back to an earlier era of supposed presidential "socialism" in the U.S. to see such current claims as "merely the latest examples of a phenomenon that might be called Wirtism"--a label Hiltzik "just coined... to honor the memory of William A. Wirt":

Wirt's day in the sun came back in 1934, when the obscure Midwestern blowhard placed himself at the center of a political maelstrom by "discovering" a plot by members of Franklin Roosevelt's Brain Trust to launch a Bolshevik takeover of the United States.

That Wirt's yarn was transparently absurd didn't keep it from being taken seriously on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He gave speeches, wrote a book and went to Washington to give personal testimony at a standing-room-only congressional hearing.

If that reminds you of the overly solicitous treatment given by the press, cable news programs and Republican office holders to purveyors of such lurid claptrap as the Obama birth certificate story or the fantasy of healthcare "death panels," now you know why it pays to study history.

One "reason not to chuckle condescendingly at Wirt," Hiltzik warns, "is the thought of what might happen were he to walk the Earth today," when Hiltzik thinks that "rather than being disowned in embarrassment, he'd be lionized as a purveyor of an alternate truth" while "given a gig on cable news and touted as a presidential contender for 2012."

Guernica magazine has a new piece by American Prospect co-founder Robert Reich (8/28/09) describing the important cog that corporate journalism represents in the functioning machinery of Washington, D.C.'s "echo chamber in which anyone who sounds authoritative repeats the conventional authoritative wisdom about the 'consensus' of inside opinion,"

which they've heard from someone else who sounds equally authoritative, who of course has heard it from another authoritative source. Follow the trail to its start and you often find an obscure congressional or White House staffer who has seen some half-assed poll number or briefing memo, but seeking to feel important hypes it to a media personality or lobbyist who, desperate to sound authoritative, pronounces it as truth. In any other place on the planet it would be called rumor, gossip or drivel. In our nation's capital it's called "inside information." The process would be harmless except that it creates self-fulfilling prophesies. Since most of our elected representatives would rather not stick their necks out lest they lose their heads, they tend to rush toward whatever consensus seems to be emerging--which, of course, is based on authoritative reports about the emerging consensus.

In the last few days authoritative sources have repeatedly told me that the public option is dead, that the president won't be able to get a comprehensive healthcare bill, and that the White House and congressional leadership already know the best they'll be able to do now is move incrementally--starting with insurance reforms such as barring insurers from using someone's preexisting health conditions to deny coverage--with the hope of more reforms in the years ahead. The right-wing media fearmongers and demagogues have won.

But, Reich urges you, "Don't believe it"--"The other thing about Washington is how quickly conventional authoritative wisdom changes" and "right-wing fearmongers and demagogues thrive only to the extent the mainstream media believes they're thriving."

Read of the effort to counter this belief in FAIR's Activism Update: "Media Take Notice of FAIR's Healthcare Petition" (7/31/09).

Analyzing "The Art of Framing at NPR" on his NPR Check blog, Mytwords (8/29/09) thinks that "there are many ways you could frame the role of Sen. Kent Conrad, one of the gang of six senators who are working very hard to preserve the profitable dominance of private health insurance in the U.S.--such as "marvel[ing] at why six senators representing less than 3 percent of the U.S. population are controlling the fate of health insurance reform," or possibly by taking a serious "look at the obscene amounts of campaign cash flowing into these senators' coffers from the for-profit health insurance industry and its allies."

"Ah, but not on NPR," writes Mytwords, when citing how All Things Considered's Andrea Seabrook "explains Kent Conrad's opposition to the pubic option and offer of health insurance co-ops as the result of his expertise on fighting government deficits and his commitment to centrism and bipartisanship."

Mytwords' response:

There's just one little, tiny problem with all this emphasis on expertise, budget deficits and BIG, NEW PROBLEMS, great co-ops, and winning Republican votes: It doesn't wash. First, there is no consensus that deficit spending is a bad thing. As far as the danger of a BIG, NEW GOVERNMENT PROGRAM costing sooooo much more money than what we've got--that's a factually challenged assertion, too. But Health Insurance Co-ops are a good thing, like Credit Unions, right? Wrong, they are a sham.

Tempted to throw the public broadcaster a bone by considering that, "Well, at least the bit about getting Republicans on board makes sense"? Mytwords points out how that is just "Wrong again." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Healthcare Reform" (8/14/09).

It's about time someone stood up for the poor insurance companies! The New York Times today delves into what it's like to be "Dealing With Being the Healthcare 'Villains,'" eliciting sad stories from nice people who work for big insurance companies and feel they're under attack.

Times reporter Kevin Sack tells us, "Some workers said that unlike other contributors to the country's healthcare problems--the doctors who overprescribe, the hospitals that fail to control infection, the consumers who do not take care of themselves--insurance companies are faceless, impersonal and distant." Sack and the NYT to the rescue! Let's put a face on these victims.

Humana's employees want the politicians to know that, in the words of Aerion V. Miles, a customer service team leader, "We are human beings, too."

This is seriously absurd. Health insurance company employees are clearly not the villains; it's the private insurance system (and if you had to put a human face on it, the CEOs). What is happening is their jobs are being threatened by the possibility of lower insurance company profits, which the Times has managed to turn into a piece on how these employees do things like volunteer at a local hospice, so jeez, why are they under such heavy assault? The New York Times is not that stupid--but it apparently does think its readers are stupid enough to fall for  pure insurance industry PR.

Glenn Greenwald (8/27/09, ad-viewing required) of Salon's series of New Republic quotes morphing from condemning a perceived "anti-Lieberman jihad" to calling for "knocking off Democrats like Conrad and Joe Lieberman" charts the outlet's "rapid and total reversal--one effectuated without the slightest acknowledgment that it even occurred."

Calling the change "just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry," Greenwald also spies "a more important point highlighted here":

namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is--and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority--that even the New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for "centrist" Democratic senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a "purity purge"), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats. [TNR editor Jonathan] Chait's rationale is that allowing "centrist" dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that--as he put it--even "a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn't worth having" because nothing meaningful changes. You don't say.

But, notes Greenwald, "that, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006." Those were "the people Chait demonized back then as 'left-wing fanatics' who 'refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.'"

Longtime friend of FAIR Sam Husseini (Husseini.org, 8/21/09) has a new blog post responding to Robert Kuttner's recent Washington Post column, in which the American Prospect magazine editor "asks 'Where are the liberal protesters?'":

It seems like a good question. Until one considers the source of the complaint--and that rather helps answer the question.

Maybe the "liberal protests" are where the American Prospect's cover story of the "Baucus 13" is.Or the where the American Prospect's lengthy piece on Linda Allision's exchange with Obama is.

Since clicking on the above links yields absolutely zero results in the American Prospect coverage, Husseini urges you to "read up on the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison's questioning of Obama" while asking, "If 'liberal' mags like the American Prospect were serious about reform, wouldn't they have relentlessly plugged the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison?"

Think Progress' Matt Corley (8/19/09) has the depressing, if predictable, news that recent polling shows "'all the misinformation out there' about health care reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans."

Corley is discouraged to see that, "for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes 'death panels' while 55 percent believe the false claim that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants"--and an MSNBC passage says that, in particular,

self-identified viewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed":

In our poll, 72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly....

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform.

In fact, just "last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox." Hear a strong corrective to all this deceit on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Health Care Reform" (8/14/09).