While it’s nice—if long past due—to see Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes in the New York Times finally and deciseivly dismiss as false the rumor of “death panels” being part of Obama’s healthcare proposals, they don’t go nearly far enough. The reporters claim that the “stubborn yet false rumor” “seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.” This is simply not true, as even the Times reporters acknowledge three grafs later: “... openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey….”
Greg Sargent discovered and reported the conservative agenda earlier this week in The Plum Line: “On a private conference call, a group of top Tea Party and conservative organizers offered a surprisingly frank description of their goal, according to a source on the call: Completely blocking any kind of bipartisan compromise, and completely preventing any type of health care reform bill at all from ever becoming law.”
The Times is to be commended for stepping up and confronting the blatant lies of the conservatives and partially tracing the source of the lies. This is orders of magnitude more valuable than the “he said, she said” stenography to which the corporate media has generally devolved. It’s reporting like this that will hopefully save the news business. But the US paper of record should have been earlier and more forceful in its reporting.
Salon‘s Joan Walsh points out that for weeks, the corporate media were ignoring the lies, resorting to the lazy and empty-headed “he said, she said” stenography we’ve come to expect. Walsh identified the Washington Post‘s Steven Pearlstine’s account as the only corporate media instance intent on calling out the conservatives and exposing their lies. Pearlstine’s writing was spot on:
“The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems….”
Perhaps it’s time to consider penalties for public lying and political terrorism perpetrated by the conservatives and the healthcare industry lobbyists.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.