An LA Times column today cited FAIR's petition demanding that the TV networks include single-payer in their coverage of the healthcare reform debate,  acknowledging that there is 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."

The Times' James Rainey concluded his column, "TV Needs To Deepen Coverage of Healthcare Reform," with a report on the delivery of FAIR's petition at ABC--the network that disinvited Obama's longtime physician Dr. David Scheiner, a single-payer advocate, from its June 24 "Prescription for America" program:

The liberal media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and a group of progressive activists delivered a petition Tuesday to ABC News in New York (which recently excluded one of the activists from a forum on healthcare) to demand broader reporting, including an assessment of government-managed health systems.

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.

Newsweek's current cover declares, "We Are All Socialists Now." But it's actually another story from the magazine that pushes the notion that Obama is likely heading the country in a (gasp!) European direction.

Michael Freedman's piece certainly doesn't start off on the right foot:

Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president of France every day?

Newsweek laments the "distinctly continental sniff" of Obama's economic rhetoric, which apparently evokes "business bashing and protectionism"  that was, until recently, "largely relegated to the far left." The real problem, though, is what it's going to do to us Americans:

Slow growth could kill rugged American individualism, too. Healthcare in the U.S. is for the most part tied to employment, so if job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government for support.... It's very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style healthcare if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there.

Pensions and healthcare for all-- this is worse than we thought!

Washington Post columnist David Broder took up the issue of healthcare policy in his column yesterday ("Health Reform's Moment," 12/14/08). One of FAIR's chief criticisms of media over the past two decades has been the narrow range of sources the media rely on to shape the debate over a given issue. Healthcare is no different, so it was instructive to read the top of Broder's column, where you see who he considers important:

On the same morning that President-elect Barack Obama introduced Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as his prospective secretary of health and human services and his point man on healthcare reform, a panel of key constituency group leaders met to assess the prospects for success.

Taking the microphone, in turn, at a Washington hotel were the head of Business Roundtable, speaking for leading corporations; the chief executive of Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company; the president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the trade association for that industry; and spokesmen for the National Federation of Independent Business, the small-business lobby, and AARP, the senior citizens organization.

All of them agreed that major health legislation has a much better chance of passage in the next Congress than when Bill and Hillary Clinton tried in 1993-94. And so did John Harwood of CNBC and myself, the two journalists invited to be on the panel.

Business groups, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies are the ones who really matter--and who will determine what "reform" ideas are possible, and which are not. It won't take Broder long to conclude--as others in the media have already-- that single-payer healthcare is off the table.

Today's column by Robert Samuelson (Washington Post, 12/1/08) is a classic of the "why the president-elect must break progressive campaign promises" genre. Usually, of course, the new president should keep such promises:

Obama won the election, and in normal times, his campaign agenda ought to be front and center. But these are not normal times, and what's most important now--as he repeatedly emphasizes--is to prevent the recession from feeding on itself.

And you do that, inevitably, by making sure not to do anything that makes corporations nervous.

Any program to refashion the energy and healthcare sectors--to take two obvious candidates--would be complicated and contentious. Some producers and consumers would win; others would lose. Proposals would create massive uncertainties for businesses and raise the probability of higher costs.

Also on Samuelson's not-to-do list is "speedy action...to support labor unions."

Samuelson ends with a strange claim: "In the long run, we need to discipline our appetite for healthcare.... [but] Obama's first job is to avert an economic freefall." Yeah, that's our problem--we're just gluttons for medicine.

Two disappointing reports in major newspapers on the healthcare debate. In the Los Angeles Times, Noam Levey writes ("Consensus Emerging on Universal Healthcare") that the momentum for real change is obvious in Washington--but that it only goes so far:

The idea of a federal, single-payer system patterned on those in Europe and Canada, long a dream of the political left, is now virtually off the table.

One might well reach such a conclusion if you only talked to the people Levey quoted in his article:

-"Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, a leading trade group whose members helped kill the Clinton administration's healthcare campaign in the early 1990s."
-"Stuart Butler, vice president for domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation"
-Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa)
-"Todd Stottlemyer, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, which was also instrumental in defeating the Clinton plan."

Perhaps for balance, there are two liberals primarily talking about the need for consensus: Ron Pollack of Families USA and UC Berkeley political scientist Jacob Hacker.

And in the no-reason-to-quote-because-they-might-as-well-not exist-department:

At the same time, advocates for a single-payer system, including the California Nurses Association, have vowed to continue pushing the idea next year along with many Democrats on Capitol Hill.

And in Sunday's Washington Post, Ceci Connolly writes under the rather blunt headline: "U.S. 'Not Getting What We Pay For'; Many Experts Say Healthcare System Inefficient, Wasteful." Post readers learn that "among physicians, insurers, academics and corporate executives from across the ideological spectrum, there is remarkably broad consensus on what ought to be done."

But the spectrum of sources in the report are not nearly as broad, and their preferred solutions reflect that-- a focus on preventive care, electronic records and so on. While those ideas have their benefits, what about advocates for a single-payer system? Or what about strong critics of the health insurance giants, whose ideas for reform are given a hearing in the Post report?

These article suffer from the same problem: There is an obvious healthcare crisis in this country, and the solution that has worked in other countries to expand access to services and cut costs as well is one that the political establishment still rejects. Thus the corporate media must reject it as well.