A common theme runs across many of the news stories on health care reform. America is losing the debate over the legitimacy of government and the value of honest discourse.
The conservative ideologues who have done more than anyone to discredit government and dishonor the truth are winning that battle but hurting the country, and doing it with witting and unwitting help from the media.
Today's New York Times front page contains a sympathetic portrait of a middle-age couple in Georgia who are concerned about the wife's illnesses. Listening to the health reform debates, they've become convinced that the government is planning to limit/ration the wife's ability to get the treatments she needs.
The husband, anxious for his wife's well being, is moved to attend his local Congressman's townhall to express his anger over the government's takeover and apparent indifference to his wife's suffering.
He told [Congressman] Bishop that his wife of 36 years had survived breast cancer through early detection and treatment, and that he feared that her care would be rationed if the disease returned.
"She'd be on a waiting list," he said.
"This is about the future of our country as we know it," Mr. Collier warned, "and may mean the end of our country as we know it."
That's all we see on the front page. The message that government in general, and the Obama Administration in particular, are out of control and want to ration care is loud and clear. . . except it's completely false.
When we pick up the story on page 10, the Times elaborates on the husband's political views and then identifies the source of his misinformation:
The Colliers are committed conservatives who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's radio program and Matt Drudge's Web site.
But the article doesn't say their fears are misplaced nor does it explain the couples' news sources are notoriously unreliable on this or many other subjects. Instead, we learn the couple have already been jerked around by their insurance company, so even though their own experience is a basis for some of the actual proposed reforms -- which the Times doesn't note -- they don't have that information or the necessary context in which to view the government's proposed regulations in a more favorable way.
To continue the misdirection, the Times has a separate story at the bottom of the same inside page, which makes no mention of the previous article. There we learn that "policy experts call fear of medical rationing unfounded." In other words, everything the couple in the prior story believed was false, and their media sources misled and lied to them.
So the front page part of the first story was completely misleading; it should have said, right from the beginning,
Conservative media sources, including Fox News, Russ Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge, have been persistently misleading people about health care reform proposals. As a result their listeners, as the experience of a Georgia couple illustrates, have become victims of unjustified fear and needless anxiety, fed by the false impression that the federal government is planning to deny or ration their health care.
These conservative media efforts are provably dishonest, but despite having the facts repeatedly corrected and the distortions denounced by numerous experts, the conserative media continue to repeat the false information, leaving those Americans who rely on the sources even more axious and confused.
It's not two stories, NYT; it's one, and your front page badly misreported the main point. That's partly why polls show a majority of the public (and 75 percent of Republicans like the couple above) incorrectly believe the government is planning to ration their health care. Why is this so difficult?
More of the same:
NYT, article describing how Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, has been smeared and his views distorted ("Bioethicist becomes lightning rod for criticism") by . . . right wing/conservative sources.
Think Progress, Coburn tells weeping victim of broken health care system that government isn't the solution
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