From FAIR:
Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system–two of whom participated in yesterday’s summit–were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found.
Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.
Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS‘s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television. […]
Though more than 60 lawmakers have co-sponsored H.R. 676, the single-payer bill in Congress, Obama has not expressed support for single-payer; both the idea and its advocates were marginalized in yesterday’s healthcare forum. But given the high level of popular support the policy enjoys, that’s all the more reason media should include it in the public debate about the future of healthcare.
I understand that single-payer has no chance in the current political situation — but that becomes a self-fufilling prophecy, not just for now but for the future, when the media refuses to discuss any policy that isn’t currently politically viable, regardless of its support among much of the general public and among many experts. I don’t want the media to go along with the political elites’ decision to ignore the public’s preference; I want the media to push against the political elite’s arbitrary boundaries of which policies are and aren’t worth discussing.
I think what this comes down to what journalism professor Jay Rosen says in this interview: “Savviness is the real idealogy of Washington journalism.”
it’s this notion that that might be a good argument, but that’s not what the committee is going to do, you know? And this kind of religion of – I call it a religion because it’s a faith – that if you’re savvy, that you are realistic, and again, you are vulnerable to irresponsible elites when you do that. You can cut yourself off from your naturally constituency which isn’t them, but an informed and engaged public.
Scholarship and public opinion both say that single-payer is a health care option that deserves serious consideration. But treating single payer seriously might make a journalist look naive — so they don’t.
