Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the '10 midterms. But he's worried that the party isn't learning the obvious lesson.

If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a catastrophic midterm election night, it was their assumption that now, at least, the party’s leaders would have to focus on recapturing the political center.... A lot of Democrats took it for granted that these defeats marked a repudiation of the speaker and of the party’s liberal agenda....

That is not, however, how Ms. [Nancy] Pelosi's liberal supporters see it. Even before the votes were cast, a counterargument was already taking hold — that it was the centrist Democrats, and not the liberals in Congress, who had imperiled the party’s majority....

The theory here, embraced by a lot of the most prominent liberal bloggers and activists, is that centrist Democrats doomed the party when they blocked liberals in Congress from making good on President Obama's promise of bold change. Specifically, they refused to adopt a more populist stance toward business and opposed greater stimulus spending and a government-run healthcare plan. As a result, the thinking goes, frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.

There are a few strange things about this argument, even beyond the contention that American voters--41 percent of whom described themselves as "conservative" this year, compared with 32 percent in 2006--somehow deem Congress to be insufficiently liberal.

Aside from the fact that "American voters" are not the same people from one election to the next, and the policies pursued by the party in power influence who those voters are, Bai misses a key point: The goal of a bigger stimulus bill would not be to make voters say, "A big stimulus bill? That sounds like something that accords with my philosophy of government.  I'll vote for that party!" The goal of a bigger stimulus bill, rather, would be to boost the economy, which history indicates is good for the party in power.

Likewise, the goal of a single-payer healthcare system or a robust public option is to deliver cheaper healthcare to more people--it's the effective delivery of healthcare, not the ideology behind the system that delivers it, that would be rewarded by voters.

NewsHour viewers last night (9/9/10) might have been surprised to see a long one-on-one conversation with far-right activist/lobbyist Dick Armey, promoting his new book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.

The interview gave Armey ample room to explain the Tea Party movement's beliefs, with host Judy Woodruff offering no real challenge to any of Armey's rhetoric--like when he claimed that Tea Party activists are "probably the kindest, gentlest, most gentle souls we ever saw. We had a million of them in town last September, and they left the town cleaner than they found it."

Armey is wildly exaggerating the size of that Tea Party protest. (It's not the first time his group has done so.) That makes some sense, though, considering that FreedomWorks has been intimately involved with organizing, training and in some cases directing these activists.

A more helpful assessment of Armey's work appeared on many PBS stations last year, courtesy of the Bill Moyers Journal (9/18/09), which pointed out that Armey's stirring calls for getting the government out of our lives and away from our healthcare are difficult to square with Armey's reliance on government healthcare benefits throughout his career--first as a professor at a state university, and then as a Congressman:

And when he retired from Congress 18 years later, he was insured by that plan until he turned 66 and Medicare, another government program, kicked in.... You can't blame him for keeping his government health plan. It's great. It gave him a lot of options, dozens of private insurers to choose from, and with 8 million members in it, the federal government's got the muscle to negotiate some of the best premiums and drug prices in the country.

And there's more:

Now get this: Dick Armey thought so much of that federal health plan--the Cadillac of coverage--that he tried to keep it as his primary carrier, instead of that other federal program, Medicare.

Mr. Armey wanted an option. A government option. How about that?

But he couldn't get out of Medicare without losing his Social Security (they're hitched together--you give up one, you give up both), so he's suing to divorce the two.... And now he says he's happy to buy his health insurance on his own.

That bit of history would have been helpful for NewsHour viewers who had to listen to Armey denounce Social Security and Medicare for being mandatory: "Let all subscription to government support and assistance programs be voluntary." Huh.

PBS anchor Judy Woodruff had a message for viewers at the close of the interview--they'll be interviewing "liberal Democrat" Arianna Huffington to get a "very different perspective." But "balance" isn't really the problem here. There are countless authors who've written interesting political books who deserve airtime; why grant a soft interview to someone like Dick Armey, who has no problem airing his views on commercial media? Huffington has plenty of opportunities to share her views as well. (She runs a rather popular website, for starters.) Remember the point of public broadcasting is to strive to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard." A politician-turned-corporate lobbyist wouldn't seem to qualify.

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote a piece today (5/24/10) headlined, "In the Absence of Debate, Iraq and Afghanistan Go Unnoticed." Hiatt laments the silence surrounding U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ponders whether "the absence of debate reflects not full-bodied consensus but a wishful averting of eyes."

Fair enough. But what kind of debate does Hiatt wish the country to have, anyway? His job gives him a chance to affect the national discussion about these wars, and the evidence suggests that he's done little to provide a forum for dissenting views. 

As FAIR's Steve Rendall wrote in his study of the Post's op-ed page and Afghanistan (for the first 10 months of 2009):

In the Washington Post, pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.

At times the Post's editors seemed unaware that an antiwar position even existed. For instance, in an op-ed roundtable (9/27/09) appearing in its recurring "Topic A" feature, the section's editors, in their words, "asked foreign policy experts whether President Obama should maintain a focus on protecting the population and rebuilding the country, or on striking terrorists."

Excluding withdrawal from the discussion was a theme echoed by Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, who began a column (9/14/09): "It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option."

Interestingly, Hiatt also had a similar beef with the debate over healthcare reform--writing (from the right) back in October,  "Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door." As we pointed out then, the Post had done next to nothing to provide an "honest debate."

If Hiatt really wants the country to debate these issues, he should start with his own paper.

FAIR's latest Action Alert (4/23/10) concerns the Frontline program Obama's Deal, which not only didn't mention the single-payer proposal, but misrepresented single-payer advocates as proponents of a public option. You can leave copies of your messages to Frontline, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread of this post.

The PBS program Frontline on April 13 offered a look at the White House drive for healthcare reform titled Obama's Deal. Like a previous Frontline special about the U.S. healthcare system, the program failed to adequately include single-payer. But the way the show did it this time was remarkable.

Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program was interviewed by Frontline--leading one to suspect that the show might include some discussion of truly universal healthcare systems like single-payer (aka Medicare for All).

But the program was a major disappointment. As she wrote (Consortium News, 4/15/10) after it aired, "Curiously, just as it was in the health 'debate,' single-payer, improved Medicare for All, was also excluded from the film."

The strange thing is that Flowers actually appears on the show (albeit briefly), in a scene recounting how single-payer activists disrupted a Senate Finance Committee hearing last May. But the protesters' views are muddled by Frontline.

As the program explained it, insurance industry lobbyists were working to kill the public option from the Senate bill. At this point single-payer activists appear. As Flowers explained:

The producers at Frontline carefully cut single-payer out of the film. When the host, Mr. [Michael] Kirk, interviewed me for "Obama's Deal," we spoke extensively of the single-payer movement and my arrest with other single-payer advocates in the Senate Finance Committee last May. However, our action in Senate Finance was then misidentified as "those on the left" who led a "counterattack" because of "liberal outrage" at being excluded.

The framing of the Frontline segment would lead viewers to believe these activists were public-option proponents, which they are not. Groups like PNHP were critical of the public option--a government-run insurance plan that would be offered to some as an alternative to mandatory private health insurance--arguing that it would leave the insurance industry intact as dominant players in the healthcare business.

After Frontline aired footage of the arrests of single-payer activists, a voice says: "So what Chairman Baucus has decided this option cannot be part of the discussion at a Senate hearing? Now, I think that's wrong. I don't think it's fair." The implication was that "option" here refers to the public option-- since no other option had been mentioned.

That voice was actually MSNBC host Ed Schultz--a supporter of single-payer.  His full quote (5/7/09) would have made that clear:

Now, let me explain single-payer for just a minute.

The money comes from one source, the government. Now, you and I pay taxes, OK. The government pays the bill. It's that simple.

Patients are not caught in the middle between doctors and insurance companies, no game-playing here. There's no middleman. You know? There's no decision-makers between you and your doctor. It's a clean deal.

So what Chairman Baucus has decided, this option cannot be part of the discussion at a Senate hearing? Now, I think that's wrong. I don't think it's fair.

Thus single-payer activists were transformed into advocates for the public option.

This is not the first time that Frontline has decided that a conversation about healthcare reform should exclude single-payer from the discussion. The March 31, 2009 Frontline special Sick Around America avoided discussions of national healthcare plans. This omission led Frontline correspondent T.R. Reid--who had hosted a previous Frontline special  (4/15/08) that examined various public healthcare models-- to withdraw from the project.

PBS ombud Michael Getler agreed with those who thought the show missed a chance to discuss single-payer. It looks like the program has done so again.

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann made two false claims about healthcare on CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday that went unchallenged by host Bob Schieffer. CBS did, however, post an article on their website challenging her claims. FAIR has a new action alert encouraging Face the Nation to debunk Bachmann's lies on its upcoming April 4 broadcast. Read the alert here and post your letters to CBS below.

Articles like "Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism" in the New York Times today (3/26/10) are fairly useless. Are Republicans "fanning the flames with coded rhetoric," as a Democratic lawmaker says, or is a Republican representative right that it's Democrats who are "ratcheting up the rhetoric"?

Readers are really left to judge based on their own partisan predilections, since Times reporter Michael Cooper gives them almost nothing else to go on. The article reports that "some Democrats accused the Republicans of stoking anger on the right with their fierce language during the healthcare debate," but it only gives one example: Sarah Palin telling her followers, "Don't Retreat, Instead--RELOAD!"

It actually gets quite a bit fiercer than that--as Cooper would know if he read fellow New York Times reporter Timothy Egan's blog post on the subject (3/24/10):

"Let's beat the other side to a pulp!" Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. "Let's chase them down! There's going to be a reckoning."

Lest anyone accuse Egan of taking King's quote out of context, those words were immediately preceded by King's suggestion that those sorts of action were a last-ditch alternative to secession (Think Progress, 3/22/10):

I just came down here so I could say to you, God bless you.… You are the awesome American people....

If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they'd be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let's hope we don't have to do that!

As a professional observer of the media for the past 20 years, I can confidently state that if a Democratic member of Congress went out to address a mob on Capitol Hill that had recently been spitting at lawmakers and chanting ethnic slurs, and urged them to beat up their opponents so they don't "have to" launch a civil war, this would be a major news story.

Instead, a check of Nexis for King's quote turns up a handful of stories--one by Rachel Maddow (MSNBC, 3/24/10), another by Terry Gross (NPR, 3/25/10), an op-ed piece in the Des Moines Register (3/26/10) and a blog post from the Cedar Rapids Gazette (3/23/10).  Congressional Quarterly HealthBeat (3/22/10) had a piece, and the Bismarck Tribune (3/26/10) reprinted Egan's post. There were also about a half-dozen pieces in the alternative press--and that's all Nexis wrote.

Is it really not a significant development when a political leader--even a Republican political leader--starts urging his followers to beat their enemies to a pulp?  Is that really something that can only be discussed in blog posts and op-ed columns?

One of the main assumptions of the final weeks of coverage of the congressional debate over healthcare reform was that the public was opposed to the White House plan. But some polling analysis shows that this wasn't the case. Barry Sussman noted this at the Nieman Watchdog on March 5. A McClatchy/Ipsos poll from late February told the usual tale: 41 percent supported the plan, 47 opposed. Sussman wrote:

But the pollsters went a step further, asking those opposed--509 people in all--if they were against the proposals because they "don't go far enough to reform healthcare" or because they go too far. Thirty-seven percent said it was because the proposals don't go far enough.

So a good number of those who answered in the negative were actually saying that they thought the White House was too timid. A subsequent CNN poll asked the same type of follow-up question, and found a similar result--as noted by the blogger Digby (3/24/10), Wolf Blitzer explained it to his CNN colleague Rick Sanchez like this:

Well, you know, when people are asked, we did that poll, CNN Opinion Research Poll, that said, "You like this healthcare bill, or not like it"; we just assumed, a lot of us, that the people who said they didn't like it didn't like it because it was too much interference, or too much taxes or whatever.

But if you take a closer look at people who didn't like it, about 12 percent of those people who said they didn't like it they didn't like it because they didn't think it went far enough. They wanted a single-payer option, they wanted the so-called public option, they didn't like not from the right, they didn't like it because it wasn't left or liberal enough.

That's how you got 50 percent of the American people who said, "we don't like this plan." But only about 40 or 38 percent were the ones who said it was too much government interference.

If reporters had understood and/0r explained this earlier, we could have had a very different debate. Then again, a corporate media that dismissed single-payer and derided the public option as out of the mainstream would be unlikely to do much better.

...he would have to take a leave of absence to recover from the shame of having heaped ridicule on a guest who tried to explain to him how Congress could and would pass a healthcare reform bill.

Daily Kos (3/22/10) recalled the January 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, in which guest Rep. Alan Grayson (D.-Fla.)  pointed out that the Senate had already passed a healthcare bill, and that the House could approve it and then pass amendments that the Senate could accept via reconciliation. Matthews' response: "OK, OK. OK, you know, this show is about reality."

Matthews continually mocked Grayson for his supposed ignorance of Senate procedure:

What are you talking about? What procedure do you know that Harry Reid doesn't know?... That Dick Durbin doesn't know? That all those top guys, that Ted Kennedy didn't know?... The secret route to the Indies that only you know about?... Why do you think the president and everybody else is dying over the fact that they lost Massachusetts? Because it didn't matter? You think they're all crazy over there, but you're smart?

Matthews' choice of insults was telling: "This is netroots talk!... This is outsider talk, and you're an elected official...and you know you can't do it. You're pandering to the netroots right now. I know what you're doing!"

By contrast, Matthews cited his insider credentials as a former Capitol Hill staffer to dismiss the lawmaker's analysis:

Well, I worked over there for many, many years, and I worked for the speaker for six years, I worked 15 years up there...and I know what I'm talking about! You ask anybody... you ask anybody in the Senate right now.... Go call the Senate legislative counsel's office and ask them if you can do this. Go ask the parliamentarians if you can do this. You haven't bothered to do that.

Matthews made it abundantly clear that only Beltway insiders are worth listening to, and that Grayson, who's only been in Congress for a little more than a year, didn't qualify: "Every night, we deal with two worlds: the real world of Congress, that has to do things and get things passed; and this outside world, represented by the netroots and the other people out there, like yourself, who play this game...and it doesn't get done!"

The host closed with a confident prediction about healthcare reform: "It's not gonna happen. Anyway, Congressman Alan Grayson, a true believer, who believes he can get things done by willing it!"

Via an interview with Raw Story (3/22/10):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it's a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it's viewed by the populace.

"It didn't have 'political support,' just the support of the majority of the population," Chomsky quipped, "which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy."

The provision has consistently polled well, garnering the support of 60 percent of Americans across the nation in a CBS/New York Times poll released in December, days after it was eliminated from the reform package. Democratic leaders deemed it politically untenable.

"There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what's been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted," Chomsky said. "There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media."

See Extra!: "Healthcare Reform Minus the Public Option—or the Public" (10/09).

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.