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    ACTION: Overcoming Slanted Reporting in the Press on Single-Payer

    . . . just in case folks didn't take the time . . .


    In my last blog, Single-Payer Health in the News?   I had posted a series of links to articles relating to the ongoing debate with the "single-payer" health care issue.

    One of the most telling links was this FAIR article: CNN: Single-Payer Is So '90s.

    Here's the thrust of the problem with outfits like CNN...


    In one of the few recent corporate media mentions of single-payer healthcare, CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen (3/5/09) explained why healthcare "reform" is more possible now than it was under President Bill Clinton:

    Fifteen years ago you sometimes heard--actually you heard quite a bit--people saying: "Let's have a single-payer system like in Canada. The government is going to be the health insurer for everybody." You don't hear that as much as you used to. So more people are on the same page more than they once were.
    Cohen is right that there were many people in favor of single-payer 15 years ago; as an Extra! article from that era (7-8/93) pointed out, New York Times polling since 1990 had "consistently found majorities--ranging from 54 percent to 66 percent--in favor of tax-financed national health insurance." The numbers today? A New York Times/CBS poll (1/11-15/09) found 59 percent in favor of government-provided national health insurance. In other words, contrary to Cohen's claim, people are on pretty much the same page today as they were 15 years ago.

    Cohen's suggestion that it was those loud voices that stymied "reform" is likewise unsupportable; as Extra! reported back in 1993, corporate media were then solidly behind the Clinton administration's big insurer-friendly "managed competition" plan:

    While the phrase "managed competition" appeared in 62 New York Times news stories in the six months following the 1992 election, "single-payer" appeared in only five news stories during that period--never in more than a single-sentence mention.
    Establishment journalists thus silenced those single-payer voices in 1993, just as Cohen and her contemporaries silence single-payer advocates today, as a new FAIR study recently revealed (3/6/09).

    Earlier (CNN Newsroom, 2/26/09), Cohen had argued that "if in time, Americans start to think what President Obama is proposing is some kind of government-run health system--a la Canada, a la England--he will get resistance in the same way that Hillary Clinton got resistance when she tried to do tried to do this in the '90s."

    As noted above, a government-financed national health insurance program is broadly popular in opinion polls, so it's unclear why Obama would get "resistance" if "Americans start to think" he's proposing such a plan. (If insurance companies start to think that, on the other hand, then they're certainly likely to create resistance.)

    --snip--

    And here is the type of action needed to overcome this form of slanted reporting at CNN.

    ACTION: Please write to Elizabeth Cohen and ask her to include the single-payer proposal as an option in the healthcare reform debate with continuing popular support.

    CONTACT:
    Elizabeth Cohen, CNN
    404-827-1500
    elizabeth (dot) cohen (at) turner (dot) com

    You can post copies of your letters to the Washington Post on FAIR's blog here. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.

    ALSO. . .

    In my previous blog,
    Single-Payer Health in the News? there was also a link to a Democracy Now  interview with Dr. Quentin Young, president of Physicians for a National Health Program  and  longtime Obama confidante criticizing the administration's rejection of single-payer healthcare.

    You will find the video interview here:

    democracynow.org/2009/3/11/dr_quentin_young_obama_confidante_


    ~OGD~


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