OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to "Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal," in which she expresses her wish to "thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove's delusional article, 'Closing In on Rove,' on August 20, 2009":

The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, "Judiciary Democrats didn't get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations." In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.

The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she "has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC," and that "stories were written in Time magazine, Harper's magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department."

Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she's actually "happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth."

David Swanson (OpEd News, 7/22/09) has "another name for 'what's called a single-payer system'"--namely: "healthcare as a human right, not a commodity to be purchased. Many humans have this right. They just aren't Americans."

Of Barack Obama's July 22 news conference "mention of single-payer in passing, as something that would be better than anything else, but something that mysteriously lies out of reach," Swanson notes that the same view "is typical of the very few mentions of single-payer healthcare in the U.S. corporate media":

I just did some searches in the Lexis Nexis databases of major U.S. and world publications, news wire services, and TV and Radio broadcast transcripts. Searching for "healthcare" in July 2009 found over 1,000 documents, the maximum number that Lexis Nexis will display. In fact, searching just the past two days found over 1,000 documents. Another search confirmed that this is "Michael Jackson" level coverage. And another search confirmed that virtually none of these documents mentioned single-payer at all, much less told anyone what it was. A search for documents later than July 1 containing single-payer OR "single payer" turned up only 197 documents.

Americans have consistently told pollsters for decades that they want single-payer. But America's government refuses to provide it, and therefore America's state media refuses to discuss it. Of the 197 records of the media mentioning single-payer in July, almost half were congressional records or press releases or otherwise not media reports at all.

Still "others were articles in medical trade publications," and "even so, those articles tended to mention single-payer very briefly and dismiss it." Read the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues: Fifteen Years Later, Public Health Insurance Still Taboo" (6/09) by Julie Hollar & Isabel Macdonald.

Addressing Bush-era Department of Justice investigations, David Swanson (6/26/09) is asking OpEd News readers the provocative question, "Did you know the United States has in recent years prosecuted hundreds of people for political reasons?"

This is a crime, or rather a crime wave, that has thus far been addressed primarily by ignoring it. You can read a lot about it from bloggers like Larisa Alexandrovna or Scott Horton. But you won't hear the president mention it on TV.

In an attempt to convince the corporate media that this issue ranked right up there with governors' sex lives and celebrities' deaths, a group of notable speakers, judges, attorneys, victims and witnesses gathered and spoke on Friday morning at the National Press Club.

Swanson's piece includes the text from "what I blogged from the event" and tells us that "you can watch the whole forum on C-SPAN. You won't find it anywhere else."

It is quite telling that, even considering how in Ed Schultz's May 7 MSNBC interview of Physician for a National Health Program Margaret Flowers and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, he "slaps a gratuitous insult on the heroines of Code Pink" and "says he's against protesting and "getting arrested" as a rule but thinks it's OK if doctors in suits and 'educated professional people' do it" and even "pretends to believe (or actually believes) that President Obama favors considering the possibility of creating single-payer healthcare," activist and author David Swanson (OpEd News, 5/7/09) "can't recall a better corporate news video segment in at least the past decade":

The heart of this story is the gaping chasm between majority opinion and the corporate agenda of the United States Senate....

Ed goes after the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs. He plays video of activist Kevin Zeese speaking up at the recent Senate Finance Committee hearing and being arrested. He explains perfectly what single-payer healthcare is. (I recommend this flyer.) And he denounces the anti-democratic exclusion of single-payer advocates by committee chairman Max Baucus.

And then Ed brings on Margaret Flowers, who absolutely nails every question he asks, and he asks the right questions. Flowers lists the polls showing that over 60 percent of Americans and 60 percent of physicians want single-payer.

Schultz's choice to air Flowers telling viewers "that the next Senate hearing is on March 12 and that advocates are asking for at least one supporter of single-payer to be included," has Swanson exclaiming that "that sort of mention of an upcoming event and very nearly inclusion of exactly what people can do to improve their country is rare indeed on our televisions."

In the latest installment of a Columbia Journalism Review series on "special interest groups... at Obama's table" and "how the media are covering them," Trudy Lieberman (CJR.org, 3/6/09) reports that

Saul Friedman, who writes a popular column called Gray Matters for Newsday, has been almost alone in writing about what he has called a "blackout" on discussions of a single-payer health system. Last month, AARP's chief (and super influential) lobbyist, John Rother, told Friedman that although there is broad support for single-payer, the cognoscenti didn’t feel that it was a pragmatic solution.

While stating that "there are vocal pockets of single-payer activism around the country," Lieberman turns to an independent outlet when noting that "a woman named Laura Bonham wrote an impassioned piece for OpEdNews.com urging Americans to reject the lockdown on a single-payer discussion." See our Media Advisory about the new FAIR Study: "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare: Proponents of Popular Policy Shut Out of Debate" (3/6/09)