FAIR associate Sam Husseini has blogged his reaction (Husseini.org, 7/4/09) to a Barack "Obama Photo Op with Helen Thomas" in which the president "came with cupcakes to wish Helen Thomas a happy birthday": "Now, if only he'd take her questions."

Obama claimed they have a "common birthday wish"--for a "real healthcare reform bill"--but Thomas is not in favor of Obama's plan, she's for single-payer.

Last week I bumped into Helen Thomas at her stomping ground, Mama Ayesha's restaurant in Washington, D.C., and she stressed the single-payer failure on the part of Obama.

I asked her if I was right, that Obama hadn't called on her since his first news conference. Yes, she confirmed. He's had five news conferences since and not a single question from her.

And why would that be? Well, "at his first news conference, she asked about Obama's buildup in Afghanistan and Pakistan and about Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal," but "Obama declined to 'speculate' about the existence of such an arsenal."

Husseini asserts that reporters "should be asking Obama: Why are you refusing to take Thomas' questions? Why are you refusing to acknowledge the existence of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal?"

But then, Husseini makes a habit of asking exactly such questions so doggedly ignored by his corporate counterparts.

Noticing that "days ago, buried in a chart under the headline "How the Health Care Bills Compare," the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information," Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill's "public plan that would 'compete with private insurers,'" as "the Times chart explained on July 18":

The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'"

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of coverage--'basic, enhanced and premium'--can be offered through the public option."

Those few grainy sentences, quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media, referred to a disturbing aspect of "public plan" scenarios. If the ostensible goal is healthcare for all, then--at best--some of the "all" would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican Party is coming from such a right-wing place that any government action to improve healthcare access is ideologically unacceptable. In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic "public plan" at least embrace the precept that the not-so-tender-mercies of the market are insufficient to fully provide for the population's medical needs.

But as a practical matter, a "public plan" coexisting with the private health insurance system--generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican "free market" fixation--is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to healthcare.

While "media accounts keep telling us that the current political debate on healthcare is unprecedented and groundbreaking," Solomon points to "an article in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, by seasoned healthcare reporter Trudy Lieberman, makes a convincing case that little has changed within the frames of media parameters."

Sign on to FAIR's petition telling corporate media to stop censoring the healthcare debate.

And if you happen to be near New York City, join our July 28 Petition delivery at ABC.

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.

Former PR agent Wendell Potter's stories of how he helped the health insurance's industry's campaign "to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko" calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film's expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize Moore. USA Today ran an editorial tied to the film against a single-payer healthcare plan, which was paired with an "Opposing View" from an insurance executive that denounced single-payer even more harshly. CBS News' Jeff Greenfield distinguished himself with his (inaccurate) claim that the U.S. doesn't have public funding for healthcare because "Americans are just different." And reviewing CNN's report on Sicko can only make one relieved that Sanjay Gupta turned down the job of surgeon general.

If you'd like to see an end to this kind of insurance industry PR masquerading as journalism, you can sign FAIR's petition calling for the inclusion of the single-payer option in coverage of the healthcare reform debate.

"The lack of single-payer support by top politicians and elite media is striking" to veteran independent journalist Roger Bybee (Z Magazine, 7/09), who reminds us that "numerous surveys have shown the popularity of the single-payer approach." Bybee points out, for example, that "a January CBS/NY Times poll showed 59 percent for a single-payer system described in vague terms," Business Week, in 2005, "found '67 percent of all Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 percent dissenting" and "in April 2008, a survey of 1,100 U.S. doctors published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed 59 percent backing among physicians for single-payer." Bybee reports on the industry response to these fairly unequivocal numbers--a response heartily welcomed by corporate news media:

Following the thinking outlined for Republicans by conservative pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, the insurers and their allies have adopted a conciliatory, "pro-reform" face. Of course, the insurers and the medical-industrial complex have a distinct vision of reform. As Dr. Don McCanne of PNHP has written: "For the insurance industry, reform means expanding their successful business model to include more individuals in their plans while shifting the higher costs to the government (taxpayers). Most people do not want to be required to purchase health plans at premiums they cannot afford, and then be stuck with inadequate coverage designed to keep premiums from climbing even higher."

Still, the insurers captured favorable media coverage for three rather hollow pledges: agreeing to drop "prior condition" considerations in signing up individual applicants in exchange for the government creating an individual mandate to purchase health insurance; accepting "much more aggressive regulation of insurance"; and announcing that they would cut $1.2 trillion from health care costs over the next decade. Each of these pledges is fraught with fundamental loopholes.

While these gestures have generated extensive media coverage and generated a sense of goodwill among some health-reform advocates, the health insurance industry has been fighting a less visible battle to ensure that the final plan emerges with insurer-designed loopholes intact.

Bybee gives an idea of the extent of the forces arrayed against the popular healthcare solution: "Toward that end, the health sector invested $134 million on lobbying in 2009's first quarter alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics." Do your part to fight back by adding your name to FAIR's petition to Tell Media: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate.

Critiquing some more of National Public Radio's healthcare reportage, blogger Mytwords (NPR Check, 6/29/09) highlights Julie Rovner of Morning Edition "reporting this morning for the private health insurance lobby": "The healthcare cost debate pretty much comes down to this: 'You can't cut costs without hurting someone.'"

Rovner then backs up her "analysis" with "a little Meet the Press sound-bite from Fred Thompson"--"The only way to really save cost is to have rationing or it can be done by a cram-down by the government and take it out of the hides of doctors, hospitals":

Rovner's report mainly serves to highlight and promote the research of Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Institute. The big deal is that Fisher has found that some areas in the U.S. with lower cost prices for healthcare have better outcomes. Funny thing is that on June 11, 2009, NPR featured this exact research. An interesting thing not mentioned on NPR is the chief "partners" of the Dartmouth Institute. On the list are

• Wellpoint Foundation
• Aetna Foundation
• United Health Foundation

I do smell a conflict of interest, eh?

Rovner fills out the report by going to a solid centrist--Len Nichols (no single-payer, he)--of the New America Foundation (as far left as NPR dare venture).

Don't worry, though--"the wrap-up is provided by Joe Antos of the far-right American Enterprise Institute, who concludes that real change to healthcare is a cultural/behavioral issue more than a cost issue." Read the new 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 and Isabel Macdonald.

ABC's Diane Sawyer claimed (CNN, 6/22/09) the network's June 24 forum on President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would feature "questions from every single vantage point."

Yet, ignoring calls from FAIR (Action Alert, 6/22/09) and advocacy groups such as Health Care Now!, the special did not include a single question from an advocate of single-payer national health insurance—despite the fact that the single-payer option polls well with the public (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09) and is seen by many experts as the best way of expanding coverage to the uninsured while also controlling costs.

In the wake of well-publicized flak ABC received from the Republican Party over the special, the Republicans' position that Obama's plan amounted to a "government takeover of healthcare" was reflected in the questions selected by ABC.

ABC's Charles Gibson asked Obama directly to respond to Republican criticism. Meanwhile, one of ABC's hand-selected questioners said he was concerned with "the big brother fear," asking, "How far is government going to go in reference to my personal life and healthcare treatments?" Another questioner, identified as an M.D., said he was "concerned" with "the government taking over healthcare."

The insurance industry's perspective was also well-represented in the forum, with ABC medical editor Timothy Johnson citing "critics" who say Obama's plan "would eventually put private insurers out of business." ABC also featured a question to Obama from the CEO of the major insurance company Aetna, as well as the head of the Lewin Group--which is owned by another major health insurance company, the United Healthcare Group.

(Four medical practitioners, the president of the American Medical Association, two family members of patients, a former government health official, two human resources managers and a small business owner were also selected by ABC to ask questions to the president.)

David Westin, president of ABC, had defended ABC's selection of guests for the forum, saying, "We will include a variety of perspectives coming from private individuals asking the president questions and taking issue with him, as they see fit." Just days before the forum, Sawyer stated on CNN (Reliable Sources, 6/22/09) that it was going to be "a room full of widely diverse ideas in which people who actually experience the reality of front-line healthcare are going to get a chance to pose their challenging questions to the president."

Yet the issue of single-payer was never raised by either the ABC interviewers or ABC's hand-selected guests, despite the fact that it is popular, and favored by 59 percent of physicians, according to recent peer-reviewed survey (Annals of Internal Medicine, 4/1/08). And despite the fact that even Obama's own doctor has criticized the government's plan in favor of a single-payer system.

In the entire ABC healthcare special, the single-payer option was only once mentioned, and dismissively, by Obama himself, in response to Republican charges that his healthcare proposal is a "Trojan horse" for "socialized medicine."

Yet, tellingly, for the corporate media's most influential media critic--Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz-– the main concern vis a vis the ABC forum was not the silencing of a popular reform proposal. Rather, it was the question of whether health insurance companies and other industry perspectives would be sufficiently represented in the forum.

In a segment on the ABC healthcare forum on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Kurtz stated to Sawyer:

You have the ultimate guest for this special, the president. Why not also include guests from the insurance industry, the hospital industry, the drug companies who also have a stake in this health care battle?

It would be a surprise to many Americans that they do not, in Kurtz's view, have a stake in healthcare reform.

But then again, corporate media's longstanding blackout on the single-payer option shows that corporate journalists have long seen the views of citizens as unimportant to the healthcare debate.

Linking to a Felice Pace piece of June 14 that connects the near-absence of single-payer-focused NPR reportage to millions of dollars in underwriting the broadcaster has received from insurance industry heavies, NPR Check's Mytwords (6/17/09) includes his own comment left under Weekend Edition Saturday's "Health Care Reform From The Insurer's Perspective" segment:

Congratulations NPR--as a "public" news station you have done a great service by providing a voice to the voiceless: the health insurance industry, which lacks the funds and connections to get its message out. After yesterday's Republican slant on the public plan from [Mara] Liasson, [Julie] Rovner and [Steve] Inskeep--you showed a brave commitment to your mission statement ["'Fair' means that we present all important views on a subject"] by giving yet more airtime to the insurance lobby this morning.

Mytwords then offers his view that "it's time to tell your member stations to stop begging for support from the public (whose opinions don't seem to amount to much on NPR)," advising them instead "to just plug into the money stream from the insurance industry that you are so loyal to." Read the current edition 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.

In today's New York Times (6/19/09), Kevin Sack's article about the prospects for healthcare reform devotes all of a paragraph to single-payer:

Seeking broad popular support, the president and congressional leaders have played between the 40-yard lines of the health policy spectrum. Those who favor a single-payer, government-run insurance system have been marginalized, along with those who would unleash the system to the free market.

This is exactly wrong. Single-payer is, in fact, broadly popular--at least according to many polls, including the most recent from the New York Times (1/11-15/09). The decision to marginalize single-payer is a decision to avoid playing between the 40-yard lines.  The Times and the rest of the corporate media are the ones who have decided that single-payer isn't popular--no matter what their polling tells them.

In his June 11 Washington Post column about a Capitol Hill hearing featuring single-payer advocates (imagine that!), Dana Milbank sheds no light on the policy debate, but manages to reveal just how deeply enveloped he is inside the Beltway bubble.

"Socialism is not dead," smirks Milbank. "It has, however, been confined to a House subcommittee." The columnist oozes condescension for single-payer activists at the hearing for harboring the quaint presumption they might get any real attention in Washington with their unpopular policy. Writes Milbank:

President Obama said it would be a "huge disruption." Democratic lawmakers ignored the single-payer crowd so completely that 13 activists got themselves arrested last month protesting at Senate Finance Committee hearings.

Since single-payer is such a non-starter, Milbank explains, the hearings are really no more than a safety valve, a token bone thrown to angry advocates in need of blowing off steam. In the end, he explains, little of substance was aired because "it was a day for venting, not answers."

In the world outside Milbank's bubble, of course, single payer is quite popular. For years, polls have consistently found majorities supporting tax-financed national health insurance. A January New York Times/CBS poll found 59 percent in favor of government-provided national health insurance. The same goes for surveys of medical professionals; for instance, a 2008 poll of U.S. doctors, published  in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found 59 percent supported a single-payer plan.

Milbank might have used his valuable column space to probe the disconnect in American democracy, where the public and relevant professionals favor a policy that can barely get arrested in official Washington. While he may think he's made good fun of healthcare activists, what he's really done is reveal how profoundly alienated he is from basic notions of democracy and the open debate of ideas.

Advocates of a single-payer health plan in the United States aren't exactly accustomed to seeing their efforts covered in the corporate media--or in the headline of a major newspaper story, no less. The Washington Post reminded us on June 6 what happens when media finally get around to taking a look at the issue.

Under the headline " 'Single-Payer' Supporters Challenge Democrats," reporter Dan Eggen deployed typically dismissive language in describing single-payer activists--writing that they had "struck again," referencing the "increasingly noisy" protesters who are "hounding" lawmakers. All this is part of an "offensive" that will "swamp" some apparently well-intentioned pro-White House house parties.

The real point is laid out pretty clearly:

The movement poses both an opportunity and a challenge for Obama, who is able to position himself as a centrist by opposing a single-payer plan but who risks angering a vocal part of the Democratic base.

In the strange world of corporate journalism, one can prove his/her "centrist" credentials by opposing a policy that has majority support from the public.

Eggen doesn't totally omit any reference to polling on single-payer; in fact, he reported that such polling "varies widely." But instead of giving some examples of this supposed variation, readers were treated to only one actual citation--a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that listed eight different options for expanding healthcare. (Single-payer finished last.) Eggen did explain that the polling on single-payer differs "based largely on how the issue is framed." Why, then, would you choose a rather unrepresentative example of such polling, when straight-forward poll questions are easy to come by? It's hard to say why, but it certainly fits with the media's well-established pattern of trying to hide the public's support of single-payer from the, well,  public.

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote a piece today (5/20/09--subscription required) that offers California as a model for understanding the difficulties in overhauling the healthcare system:

California's experience, in fact, represented a kind of trial run for the healthcare overhaul the president and Congress are about to attempt on the national level, offering useful lessons as well as warning signs about the potholes ahead.

Well, yes and no. Seib writes that the "California example showed the importance of securing at least some bipartisan support, the need to reassure those who have insurance as well as those who don't, and the imperative of showing the public that healthcare costs can be tamed." But there's another layer to this story, one that Seib mostly avoids: the support for a single-payer system in the state.

Seib writes that "California's effort was launched by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in early 2007." That would leave out the nine years of single-payer legislative action prior to that year; in fact, in 2006 the single-payer bill SB 840 passed the state legislature, only to be vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It was reintroduced the following year, and thanks to a massive organizing effort (aided by Michael Moore's film SiCKO) it once again passed the state legislature--and was once again vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It has been reintroduced this year.

Different lessons can be drawn from this experience, of course. But in Seib's version of California history, we get only a glancing mention of this: "Some liberals pushed a government-run health plan." The corporate media (along with various politicians) are determined to keep single-payer "off the table" in the current national debate; Seib seenms to want to erase it from the past, too.

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."

A recent Frontline documentary (3/31/09) presented mandatory for-profit healthcare as the only alternative to the current U.S. healthcare system, suggesting that this was the system all other developed nations use--even though the documentary was a sequel to an earlier Frontline report (4/15/08) that examined a wide range of international options, including Taiwan's single-payer model.

If you'd like to ask Frontline why it distorted the healthcare policy options, you can take part in FAIR's Action Alert here.  And you can leave copies of letters you send to Frontline in the comments of this post.

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)