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Real Journalism: A Prerequisite for Real Debate on Healthcare
For coverage of our delivery of FAIR's ongoing petition demanding that the TV networks cover proposals for a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system to ABC News' NYC studio, you can tune into Democracy Now!--a media outlet that could teach the networks a thing or two about how to contribute to, rather than interfere with, the public debate on healthcare reform.
If the public has managed to get any TV news at all about single-payer, or to hear the perspectives of the large numbers of physicians and citizens who support this proposal, it is thanks to outlets like DN! and shows like the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.
Given that 59 percent of the public, and an equal percentage of physicians, support single-payer, according to recent polls, one would think that the inclusion of this proposal in the media debate would be a no-brainer for any self-respecting journalist.
After all, we hear so much about the soaring costs of U.S. healthcare and the tens of millions of uninsured Americans, and we know that single-payer systems have been successful in keeping healthcare costs down, while providing broad universal coverage, in other industrialized countries.
There is a word for what Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and PBS' Bill Moyers are doing when they interview some of the many prominent medical professionals who favor single-payer--people like doctors Quentin Young and David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program.
Journalism is what many people would call it.
Yet the practice stands in marked contrast to what's been going on at ABC, where FAIR, Healthcare Now!, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Private Health Insurance Must Go coalition, and the Raging Grannnies delivered our petition on Tuesday, signed by over 12,500 people including filmmaker Michael Moore, former MSNBC host Phil Donohue, and actors Mike Farrell, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.
As we pointed out to the ABC representative sent to receive the petitions, ABC has not had one single-payer advocate on air all year.
I recently had the chance to ask ABC's Senior VP of Communications Jeffrey Schneider about why the network had disinvited Obama's longtime physician Dr. David Scheiner from its recent healthcare forum, where Dr. Scheiner was planning to ask the president a question about healthcare reform.
(Watch FAIR's video in which Scheiner stated that he believed that he'd been disinvited from the forum because ABC was "afraid" he would ask a question that was more "challenging" than what ABC wanted here, and Democracy Now's interview with Scheiner here)
ABC's VP Schneider took offense at my question: "To draw some kind of nefarious conclusion is simply ridiculous," he told me in a phone interview.
Of course, there is a far more accurate term than a "nefarious" plot to explain the systematic exclusion of a popular proposal that major insurance companies and the politicians they back would rather not talk about.
FAIR has always called it "corporate journalism"--the product of a media system in which much of our news is produced by powerful for-profit corporations, whose interests, through interlocking boards of directors and lucrative advertizing contracts, often closely overlap with those of other powerful corporations--including the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that have the most to gain from keeping single-payer off the table.
Now more than ever--as single-payer activists march in DC today to commemorate the anniversary of Medicare--it is essential that we oppose the corporate media's interference in the public debate that is so urgently needed if we are to really address America's broken healthcare system.
It is not too late to sign onto FAIR's petition, and help us spread the word about it, before we deliver it to the other TV networks, which a FAIR study found have a similarly dismal record when it comes to stonewalling discussion of single-payer.
Already, we've managed to create quite a buzz about the media's sick healthcare coverage, and yesterday, the LA Times wrote about out petition delivery, and acknowledged that single-payer represents a "gaping hole" in the media's healthcare coverage.
We now have over 13,000 signatures on the petition. Let's step up the pressure and see what can be acheived with 20,000 on board.
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7 Comments so far
Show AllThe fact that the current system does not serve the needs of people, except for a few, should be enough to motivate change.
It would in a Democracy.
But the USA is not a Democracy---it is a Plutocratic Oligarchy and one of the major industries (Insurance) that helps to make it that, stands to loose the most if the problem were handled by a true Democracy.
But they can send people into space for extended periods of time, but cannot solve their troubled society's many problems.
If the USA were an individual, they would be locked up with multiple life sentences for a long list of felony charges, and conviction would simply be a matter of deciding on the sentence.
Or, locked up in a mental institution for a life sentence as a major threat to itself, 'with a long list of mental conditions that cannot be treated effectively without institutionalization'------
Q: How many Americans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: only one, but the light bulb has to 'really want to change'..........
Good Luck America, you really need it.
"Or, locked up in a mental institution for a life sentence..."
Oh if this were only true, but alas, since Reagan, we here in the US DRUG the individual to burn out any remaining ability to reason, and then deposit them on some street corner in a large city. We used to take care of our criminally insane (this would discribe most of the US's policies), but now.... poof... they just go away.
As a retired investigative journalist among whose heroes I count IF Stone, MS Arnoni, and CBS News before Dan Rather,
AND, as someone who has been following the current so-called "debate" on health care reform, I have signed FAIR's petition and urge others to do so.
Now that the Blue Dog Dems and the Mitch McConnell thugs in the Senate have forced a delay on the vote so Sen. Baucus in control of the Senate Finance Committee can rake in more campaign money from those he is tasked to regulate, it is incumbent upon all of us to press for, by any means necessary, inclusion of single-payer in the debate.
Meanwhile, where I used to regularly watch ABC's evening news, I have been boycotting it ever since I watched Charles Gibson "mediate" a presidential debate last year.
Decades ago I read Noam Chomsky's early works on semantics and then his book entitled "American Power and the New Mandarins" or some such and I understood much of the nature of "resource wars." As an extension of nationalistic wars going back a very long time. These days, transnational corporations, including most especially those dealing with finance (including insurance companies) possess many more powers than most nations.
If the government cannot control the costs of health insurance and health care---and so far it has failed to do so---it loses relevance. People will soon realize---if they do not already comprehend---that they are paying taxes into a black hole of profiteering, as with Goldman-Sachs. We will have "health care" controlled by blood-sucking vampires, and we will be sitting at home watching old black & white films-noir(e), seeking cues on how to defend ourselves. And we will not find them. What we now have here is a colorized version of The Maltese Falcon. Congress is giving us The Bird when what we need this time round is the Real Thing, which is not only economically plausible, but in the long run the only alternative. Anything else is selectively SELFISH.
We really do need a mass movement at this time, pitchforks and oily torches in the night, descending upon Washington en masse with huge battering rams to smash open the locked doors of the Congress. (Those unresponsive assholes who barely acknowledge our letters and e-mails...!)
We really do ALSO need to talk about why our bodies (and minds!) are so sick in America and why our medicine is so "reactive" instead of Proactive. We need to discover what is making us so sick and we need to cure it/us. That would reduce "health care costs" more than all the machinations in
Washington. Oops! That would require rewriting the Agriculture subsidies, and the Big Pharma subsidies, and an assault on Monsanto, ADM, DuPont et al. Oh Well...
As another on this forum has posted, often: "Good luck America. You really need it."
We really need to clean up our act, ASAP. Business as usual, which is what Washington is trying to restore, ain't possible. With every passing second they are committing us to slavery.
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OleManRiver, that was a most excellent post. While a single-payer health insurance system is the only rational way to go, I especially liked your paragraph on "We really do ALSO need to talk about why our bodies (and minds!) are so sick in America...".
I have often pointed this out to friends and family members - that there should not be so much sickness (not just in America, but in most western countries) in the first place, considering that this is supposedly an affluent society, with clean drinking water and decent sanitation, and it's a temperate climate. The chances of illness are naturally far greater in a tropical climate, a poorer country with poor drinking water quality and poor sanitation facilities, and where the people do not get adequate food. With some small changes and improvements here and there, the need to go to a hospital must go down drastically. And with more investment in public transportation, improved safety on the roads and workplace, accidents must go down drastically as well - all in all, the need to go to the hospital must go down. Of course, for that to happen, you would have to start with the food supply and the environmental pollution - which means going after all the culprits you listed above. It would also mean that people really need to get educated on good nutrition and what they put into their own bodies.
Sioux
OLE MAN RIVER: Interesting post. I agree with most of your observations. As to the "why are so many sick," I think the major contributing factors include:
1. The sedentary lifestyle of so many = obesity for plenty. Plus the fake sweeteners AND corn syrup added to everything!
2. The hundreds upon hundreds of chemicals used to grow our food, preserve its "shelf life," added to the unwarranted exposures through air, soil, water to countless toxic chemicals. You probably recall that waterways tested (for drinking water safety) in major cities revealed discernible levels of all sorts of big pharma cocktails?
3. The karma of war: in addition to our nation testing a great many nuclear devices over the Southwest (with the presumption that the air, carrying particles, never blows), there is also the more abstract premise of karmic blowback.
4. The growth of the fast "food" industry and the "All American diet" which features the double cheese-burger (loaded with fat), french fries (nothing nutritional about them and they clog up the intestines as do most fried foods), and soda or a milk shake (made with some fake derivative of what once might have been called ice cream).
5. Name it....
Since most learn compassion through the experience of their own pain or suffering, with so many feeling compromised health, the beginning murmurs of a greater collective compassion might well emerge. That is the only light I can find in this tunnel.
Real journalism is not just "a prerequisite for real debate on healthcare", it's a prerequisite for democracy, period! There will always be conflicting pulls and pressures and there will always be greed. But if these issues are to be resolved through dialogue and debate, and not by violence or by forming one's own armed militia (as is already happening in various parts of the world), the MOST important requirement is to have independent and socially responsible media. Democracy takes work, and people cannot go back to watching game shows and reality TV after the occasional voting, and imagine they are living in a democracy.
There are many real journalist out there, what counts is getting them to the people via the msm who will not even consider allowing them air time, mostly due to reagan's trashing of the fairness doctrine and his allowing the corporate a personality that enjoys the protection of the Bill of Rights.
As of now the internet and public tv and books and lectures are the venues left open to those journalists that report the truth.