Conservative Media

The corporate media continues its misinformation campaign against healthcare reform.

Major television networks have given inordinate attention to “perceived setbacks” to healthcare reform legislation while downplaying any progress, according to Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group.

Meanwhile, on a local level, The Oklahoman continues its relentless opposition to healthcare reform in editorial after editorial, often without mentioning there are approximately 46 million people in the nation without health insurance or that the price of healthcare and health insurance premiums have risen astronomically over the last decade.

The Oklahoman resorts to typical hackneyed, clichéd arguments about healthcare from a right-wing perspective. According to a recent editorial, “As it is, the legislation is a big-government liberal’s health care dream come true.” This “liberal’s health care dream” tripe prevents real discussion about the issue.

Here are some facts about healthcare in Oklahoma, which I have reported on before:

Roughly 1.9 million people in Oklahoma get health insurance on the job, where family premiums average $12,256, about the annual earning of a full-time minimum wage job.

Since 2000 alone, average family premiums have increased by 77 percent in Oklahoma.

Household budgets are strained by high costs: 29 percent of middle-income Oklahoma families spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care.

High costs block access to care: 17 percent of people in Oklahoma report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.

Oklahoma businesses and families shoulder a hidden health tax of roughly $1,900 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.

19 percent of people in Oklahoma are uninsured, and 70 percent of them are in families with at least one full-time worker.

The percent of Oklahomans with employer coverage is declining: 54 percent were covered in 2007.

While small businesses make up 78 percent of Oklahoma businesses, only 39 percent of them offered health coverage benefits in 2006.

Choice of health insurance is limited in Oklahoma. BCBS OK alone constitutes 45 percent of the health insurance market share in Oklahoma, with the top two insurance providers accounting for 71 percent.

Choice is even more limited for people with pre-existing conditions. In Oklahoma, premiums can vary based on demographic factors and health status, and coverage can exclude pre-existing conditions or even be denied completely.

The overall quality of care in Oklahoma is rated as “Weak.”

16 percent of children in Oklahoma are obese.

28 percent of women over the age of 50 in Oklahoma have not received a mammogram in the past two years.

45 percent of men over the age of 50 in Oklahoma have never had a colorectal cancer screening.

Why do the editorials against healthcare reform in The Oklahoman never honestly address these issues? Health insurance premiums in Oklahoma have risen 77 percent since 2000, but the newspaper’s editorial writers apparently don’t even see it as a compelling issue in the healthcare reform debate.

The Media Matters study shows, perhaps, an even more insidious and subtle misinformation effort at work.

According to Media Matters:

In their health care reform coverage, media have repeatedly given considerably more attention to perceived setbacks to progressive reform efforts than to events that signal progress for those efforts. A Media Matters for America analysis of transcripts available in the Nexis database has found that broadcast and cable news featured almost twice as many segments mentioning the American Medical Association's (AMA's) reported opposition to a public insurance plan as segments mentioning the AMA's recent announcement that it supported the House Democrats' health care reform bill, which includes a public plan.

When it comes to healthcare reform, the corporate media is acting typically conservative, supporting the interests of big health insurance companies over ordinary people. In the end, this is a bad, long-term business model for major media news outlets, some of which are in financial decline.

The question is how the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama should counteract the corporate media’s bias against healthcare reform as the debate intensifies and Republicans rely on the worn-out language of a dead ideology repudiated nationwide in the 2008 elections.

Should the Democrats directly attack the media for its bias over healthcare reform, risking further unbalanced coverage? How can they present their message more effectively through alternative media sites?

As I’ve written before, the nation needs more national and local media outlets that don’t rely on the corporate rhetorical frames hard wired in the current mainstream press.

(The Walter Cronkite quote in the above image can be found here.)

Major and minor elements of the kooky, right-wing propaganda ministry-from Rush Limbaugh to The Oklahoman—are goose-stepping to a predictable march song of lies, distortions and fear mongering when it comes to healthcare reform.

The stagnant, right-wing message: Keep things just as they are when it comes to healthcare because the current system rewards big business. Corporate welfare, as we all know by now, is a basic tenet of the GOP platform.

Let’s look at three right-wing myths about healthcare:

(1) “You will have to go into a government healthcare program.” No, under current healthcare reform plans circulating in the U.S. Congress, no one with health insurance will have to change plans. You will have a choice. President Barack Obama and top Democratic leaders in favor of reform have repeatedly said this.

(2) “Insurance companies will not be able to compete with a government-run insurance option.” That’s an absurd claim. If health insurance companies can’t compete, then government is obviously the answer here, not insurance companies. The right-wingers haven’t produced any type of convincing argument or study showing how, say, a government insurance program would run Blue Cross Blue Shield out of business. It’s all disingenuous rhetoric.

(3) “The public option will lead to a single payer system like England’s or Canada’s healthcare plan and that would be terrible.” No, the public option in terms of insurance choice is self-sustaining. It would pay for itself. It’s simply an option. The slippery slope argument is terrible unconvincing in this case. Also, both Canada and England and other single payer systems spend less on healthcare than the U.S., and they have better medical outcomes.

As usual, the corporate media, facing a major financial decline because of its own stagnation, continues to report the misleading right-wing rhetoric as a serious argument or one part of a debate about healthcare without exposing the influence of the health insurance company lobby and its connection to political officials.

The only real argument is how to pay for other parts of the healthcare reform program besides the public insurance option. But even there the corporate media reports the argument with the foregone conclusion that any type of tax hike on the country’s wealthiest citizens is terribly controversial. Why? Under former President George Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress, the wealthiest people in the country saw a dramatic rise in their incomes while salaries for everyone else remained stagnant.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on healthcare reform:

Well, isn't this good? Get ready to get gang-raped again, folks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will not give the public a week to review the final text of a health care reform bill before it's voted on later this year. . . .Hugo Chavez ain't got anything on us. The way this -- this is the most leftward, radical leftist House of Representatives this nation has ever elected and they are behaving as total statist autocrats."

Here’s The Oklahoman on healthcare reform:

As it is, the legislation is a big-government liberal’s health care dream come true.

There’s a public insurance option, which a number of experts believe will crowd out private insurance over time, slowly taking the United States to a "single-payer” system run by Washington.

It would bar private insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and it would be funded by soaking a small group of Americans, judged able to pay because of their income level.

Note all the rhetoric about Hugo Chavez, “radical leftist,” “big-government liberal’s health care dream come true” and “soaking a small group of Americans.”

The right-wingers rely on emotional appeals to manipulate people because they can’t rationally argue against healthcare reform or a public option without contradicting themselves. The corporate media then reports these emotional appeals as SERIOUS DEBATE. It’s not. It’s the pathetic, dying gasps of a failed ideology and a misguided political party in major decline.

Is real reform impossible because of Republicans, conservative Congressional Democrats, and the supermajority that’s needed to pass any legislation in the U.S. Senate these days? Maybe so, even though a vast majority of Americans want reform. It may well take until after the 2010 elections to pass any real reform as Democrats increase their numbers in Congress because of GOP obstructionism.

Just like General Motors, American newspapers have failed to significantly change their business model as they sink into oblivion, a fact noted in recent years by countless numbers of pundits, journalism professors and business experts.

Tied to dirty and unsustainable production methods--paper, ink, fossil fuel for delivery—most hard-copy newspapers have apparently made the decision to continue to print until their last subscriber dies, shifting resources away from their online sites, which obviously represent their future. Like GM’s fundamental error to build shoddy, gas guzzlers as the world ran out of oil, it’s baffling. It’s no surprise some politicians have begun a discussion about a newspaper bailout.

The new newspaper is online, and it has a leaner and more productive staff. It counts on stringers, citizen journalists and government institutions to provide factual and sometimes mundane facts of our culture, from marriage records to monthly tax revenue reports to school board decisions. It employs enterprise reporters, who have infinite space to produce in-depth stories and then participate in a dialogue with their readers. It uses video, audio, images and interactive graphics to tell stories.

But, more importantly, the new newspaper, if it strives for viability, exposes and excludes the illogical right-wing rhetoric that continues to pervade virtually every media outlet in the country, from Fox News to The Washington Post, from CNN to the Los Angeles Times. Here, again, it becomes GM-like obvious: the shrinking demographics of the Republican Party make the right-wing mantra non-profitable in the future. The neoconservative agenda of former President George Bush was completely repudiated as an utter failure. Why give the agenda’s failed slogans and propaganda more space? Why tie a business model to shrinking demographics and hollow ideology?

One of the nation’s most fraudulent mythologies over the last three or four decades is the right-wing argument that the media actually holds a left-wing bias. It has been repeated so often by right-wing politicians and the right-wing press, media executives probably think this to be true. It isn’t true. Metropolitan newspapers represent the epitome of American capitalism and conservative, authoritarian political views, and every rhetorical aspect of their content reflects this.

All of this brings us to the state’s two largest newspapers, The Oklahoman and The Tulsa World, both of which only serve conservative audiences and continue to frame stories with a right-wing bias. How can they attract new readers to their online sites given the fact they have supported and continue to support some of the nation’s most extreme conservative politicians, such as U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe? Are they self-destructing? How can they attract the loyalty and trust of progressives and centrists as they tacitly support the extreme right-wing agenda? Is it even possible? If not, doesn’t this mean there are opportunities for new centrist online sites in Oklahoma?

One bit of information that muddies the issue is the fact Oklahoma lags behind in Internet use. Only 58 percent of Oklahomans live in a home with access to Internet. The national average is 67 percent. Oklahoma has the fifth lowest rate in the nation. Perhaps the low Internet use means the two newspapers have been slow to capitalize fully on new readership groups compared to the rest of the country, and this will change.

Metropolitan newspapers and their online sites must become more inclusive, support a wide-range of political candidates, reject right-wing extremism and embrace progressive voices, or they will continue to decline financially.