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On Public Option, MSM Gets It Wrong
By Robert Parry
A consensus quickly formed that it wasn't that their reporting had been lousy, but that Reid had caved in to the left-wing base of the Democratic Party.
The American mainstream media is in another snit, having misjudged the prospects for the public option on health care almost as completely as big-time journalists bungled the reporting on the Iraq War and a host of other important stories during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Indeed, if you had listened to all the supposedly knowledgeable journalists covering the health-care debate on Capitol Hill, you might have been shocked to learn Monday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was putting a version of the public option in the bill that he is bringing to the Senate floor.
For instance, CNN’s Dana Bash has told listeners to her “no bias” news network that the only piece of legislation that mattered was the one emerging from the Senate Finance Committee, a position shared by nearly all the other “smart” journalists and pundits. That’s why, they said, they were devoting so much time to covering every twist and turn of the committee’s negotiations.
That devotion wasn’t shaken even by the strange legislative concoction that emerged from the Finance Committee. Since it didn’t include the public option, the insider thinking was that the idea was effectively dead, though a public option was included in the four other committee-approved bills, all three on the House side and one from the Senate Health and Labor Committee.
Still, Bash and her MSM colleagues told us that the Finance Committee bill would be the framework for final congressional action and the other four bills would be mostly cast aside. After all, the Finance Committee bill had the support of one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.
That conventional wisdom remained set in concrete despite many Democratic members of Congress indicating that the public option was alive and well – and despite opinion polls showing that the American people favored a public option by about a 2-to-1 margin.
So, when the MSM’s smug certainty went up in smoke on Monday, as Reid announced that he would include a version of the public option with an opt-out provision for states when he takes the legislation to the full Senate, the journalists were in a foul mood.
A new consensus quickly formed that it wasn’t that their reporting had been lousy, or that the public option made a lot of sense, or that the people’s will was finally being respected. It was that Reid had betrayed them by caving in to the left-wing base of the Democratic Party.
Reid’s announcement, declared the Washington Post’s snide columnist Dana Milbank, “was an admission of the formidable power of liberal interest groups. He had been the target of a petition drive and other forms of pressure to bring the public option to the floor.”
A petition drive, no less. Citizens signing a petition urging their elected representatives to take a position favored by a large majority of the American people. How nefarious!
‘Instant Hero’
Milbank further presented Reid’s supposed cave-in as a crass political calculation designed to make him “an instant hero on the left.”
“Reid, facing a difficult reelection contest next year at home in Nevada, will need such [liberal activist] groups to bring Democrats to the polls if he is to survive,” Milbank wrote.
Nevertheless, Milbank depicted Reid’s allegedly opportunistic embrace of the public option as foolhardy, claiming that the Senate majority leader lacked the 60 votes needed to stop a Republican filibuster that would doom the bill.
Milbank quoted the perturbed CNN correspondent Dana Bash challenging Reid about whether he had the 60 votes needed for cloture. “Do you feel 100 percent sure right now that you have the 60 votes?” Bash asked.
When Reid responded by saying “my caucus believes strongly there should be health-care reform,” Bash chastised Reid for not answering “particularly on this idea of a public option.”
After Reid turned to another questioner, Bash interrupted, “Senator Reid, with all due respect, is it possible to answer the question on whether or not you have the votes?”
Reid answered, “I believe we clearly will have the support of my caucus to move to this bill and start legislating.”
In his column, Milbank claimed that Reid’s additional response “also didn’t answer the question.”
But what Reid was saying should have been clear to anyone who has followed this important issue. His answer indicated that he believes the Democrats will vote together to stop a Republican filibuster – “to move to this bill and start legislating” – even though some conservative Democrats may vote against portions of the bill when amendments are considered on an up-or-down basis.
As Reid’s news conference was ending, CNN’s Bash was still miffed. “How much of this is about making liberals happy?” she called out as Reid was leaving the podium.
You could read through all of George W. Bush’s press conferences to look for a similarly insulting remark from a mainstream journalist, demanding to know, for instance, whether Bush was invading Iraq to “make the neocons happy.” But you surely wouldn’t find it.
Over the past three decades, the Washington mainstream news media has increasingly tilted right either out of fear of career retribution from right-wing, anti-journalism attack groups or out of shared conservative and neocon ideology. Generally speaking, those journalists, who have played ball with the Right and the neocons, have done well, and those who went against the grain have lost jobs.
Washington’s relatively small journalistic community remembers well the fates of honest journalists who produced stories that upset the Republicans and especially the Bush family.
Think, for instance, of the firings of star CBS “60 Minutes” producer Mary Mapes and three other producers (and the pushing out of anchor Dan Rather) for alleged imprecision in vetting documents used in an otherwise accurate story about George W. Bush ducking his National Guard duty.
Meanwhile, there are almost no career risks in showing disdain for “liberals,” even when that prejudice appears to have contributed to inaccurate reporting on the shape of health reform, one of the biggest legislative battles in recent U.S. history.
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