Media’s Harmful Reporting on Health Care
Posted September 3rd, 2009 by Jordan Berg
Despite the amount of ink spilled about health care reform, there is a surprising lack of critical analysis about the debate. Polls show that a majority of Americans are unaware of what the bills actually contain, and TV interviews show that many people fear provisions that don’t even exist in the legislation.
An NBC news poll revealed: “Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.”
The NBC poll also found that 45 percent of respondents think that “death panels” – government committees that would decide when to stop providing medical care to the elderly – are real.
Remarkably, the media blame the American people for being misinformed, never making the link between their own poor coverage of the debate and the public’s confusion.
But looking at how (and how badly) the media report on health care helps us understand why people don’t have the information they need to judge President Obama’s health care plan.
There are substantive questions about the health care proposal that many citizens have raised during the town halls. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage in the news media. Corporate news media are more focused on the screaming antics than the important questions. But it’s the media’s role to take policy proposals and explain them to the public, to offer us critical analysis rather than just to serve up a blow-by-blow of a few raging people and pundits.
Besides ignoring the real questions, corporate media portray only two simplified versions of citizens involved in the health care debate: Those who question the plan are only screaming Neanderthals, intent on drowning out any dialogue and shaming their elected officials; those who support the president’s proposal are inept, unable to make a real case for health care reform to the American people, and are veering toward socialism.
What’s the result of reporting that misconstrues the issues, emphasizes noise and conflict, and omits important information? We need only look at the poll findings to see it: People believe that part of the health care plan is to put senior citizens to death. This misunderstanding says less about the people who believe it, and more about the failure of the media to disseminate accurate information.
And this is perhaps the most damning evidence: a complete failure by the media to explain a provision (proposed by Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) in the current health care bill) that would allow for end-of-life conversations between doctors and patients to be covered by Medicare.
Beyond the media’s penchant for conflict, how else to account for the abysmal failure to adequately inform the public? Some analysts are offering an explanation. The Columbia Journalism Review suggests that corporate media do not want to thoroughly cover the health care debate because it “does not hold people’s attention.”
That argument, however, ignores the bottom line – the big profit motive to churn out cheap-to-produce celebrity news and infotainment, rather than public service journalism, which is expensive but important. The drive to pad their pockets explains why the big corporations that control nearly everything we read, see and hear will always be more interested in celebrity talking heads rather than on fulfilling their responsibility to explain complex legislation to the American public.
It’s critical that we work to take back our media system from the corporations that are harming us. Our health literally depends on it.
