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.

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!

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.

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.