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Tired of all the media spin about health care reform? Check this out.
What the Liberal Media Aren’t Telling You About Obama’s Healthcare Plans
Two thumbs down: ABC ObamaCare Special Turns Into Presidential Filibuster
President Obama uses network primetime special and overtime ‘Nightline’ coverage to talk for more than 45 minutes of combined 75-minute programs, revealing nothing new.
Call this a teachable moment, but even with ABC’s best-laid plans to kickstart the debate about health care reform and not allow the “Prescription for America” special to become an “infomercial,” as many have complained – the president spent more than twice as much time as his questioners vaguely answering or not answering the questions asked of him. But the network consistently presented the event as part of the need to fix a “broken system.” When asked, every one of the 164 hand-picked audience members said they felt that health care needed to be changed.
In fact, at one point, the president went on for four minutes and 33 seconds to answer a question about government interference, the “Big Brother fear” as the questioner put it and how it would be paid for. In the next segment Gibson pleaded with the president to keep his response to the next question shorter.
Timing is everything:
In addition to Obama’s longwinded responses, the ABC special left the most critical questions until the “Nightline” portion of the segment – after a 30-minute break for local news and likely fewer viewers.
The Obama Network’s idea of fair and balanced–attack the questioner:
One of the biggest points of contention opponents of government’s involvement in health care has been the threat that it would crowd out private health insurance providers by creating market forces they couldn’t compete with – or what Aetna Insurance president Ron Williams called it as part of the town hall: “introducing a new competitor that has rulemaking ability, the government would have.”
While William’s was introduced as an audience questioner he actually faced a question from Sawyer, which wound up being a populist rant critical of his industry and emphasizing the president’s claim that insurance companies need to be “kept honest.”
“If I could, I’m going to bring in Ron Williams from Aetna, CEO of Aetna, and if I can reverse the order a little bit Mr. President, I’d like to ask a question of him and then let you comment on his answer,” Sawyer said. “Mr. Williams, Aetna, to take one, an insurance company. We hear people all over the country people see their premiums going up 119 percent in the last several years. They see the profits of the insurance companies, the billions and billions of dollars, even in a lean year. They see profits in the billions of dollars. Is the President right – that you need to be kept honest?”
In other words, it went as you’d expect any state-controlled media event to go: all the government’s way.
ABC News has become the Obama Administration’s news organization of record on healthcare reform. From Drudge’s headline, ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE
On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!
Highlights on the agenda:
ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.
The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.
MORE
Late Monday night, Republican National Committee Chief of Staff Ken McKay fired off a complaint to the head of ABCNEWS:
My emphasis. From the complaint:
As the national debate on health care reform intensifies, I am deeply concerned and disappointed with ABC’s astonishing decision to exclude opposing voices on this critical issue on June 24, 2009. Next Wednesday, ABC News will air a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House with President Barack Obama. In addition, according to an ABC News report, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, WORLD NEWS, NIGHTLINE and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.” This does not include the promotion, over the next 9 days, the president’s health care agenda will receive on ABC News programming.
The rest of the complaint at the link.
Rush Limbaugh has been calling mainstream media “state-controlled” media lately. Looks like he nailed that one. What a humiliating descent for a once-credible news organization, from respected journalism to simple purveyors of the party line.
The war of words for your heart and mind is on. Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus
The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.”
The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.
It makes me think of purse-lipped Puritan-fundamentalist types whose hair styles are irrelevant, but that’s just me. I can see how talking about “global warming” is a big problem for them, though, because it’s not true, and people know it. The Earth has actually been cooling for about ten years, and ice at the poles is not disappearing. And there is a lot of scientific dispute about it because of the faked data and flawed methodology and uncooperative computer programs whose models don’t come near to predicting reality, all of which were used to hype it. The increasing numbers of respected scientists who are becoming more vocal about their reservations doesn’t help, either. And it has already entailed economic sacrifice, as has been shown in Europe.
So, what to do about these inconvenient and hurtful truths? In the PR world you ignore them. You dumb it down, personalize it and accentuate the positive, even if the positive is non-existent:
“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.
Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”
Apparently people are tuning out when they hear “the environment,” so that will disappear, to be replaced by blather about saving money for a more prosperous future, the air we breathe, the water our children drink. I guess we won’t have Al Gore to kick around anymore.
The other side’s doing it, too:
Opponents of legislation to combat global warming are engaged in a similar effort. Trying to head off a cap-and-trade system, in which government would cap the amount of heat-trapping emissions allowed and let industry trade permits to emit those gases, they are coaching Republicans to refer to any such system as a giant tax that would kill jobs…
Which has the virtue of being a fact, again looking to the European experience.
One thing professional manipulators agree on:
And, Mr. Luntz and Mr. Perkowitz agree, “climate change” is an easier sell than “global warming.”
A few days ago, before the President left for the G20 summit, I heard about a poll saying that the American people support the President’s economic actions. I thought, sure, the legacy media is boosting him in anticipation of his European trip with a doctored poll. How slanted was that poll? Besides the usual oversampling of Democrats (36% vs 25% Republicans), I mean. From Townhall, Washington Polling Games:
…Check out the way this question was asked by the Post pollsters.
“How much of the blame do you think [fill in the blank] deserves for the country’s economic situation?” The choices were corporations, banks, consumers, the Bush team and the Obama administration. There’s a built-in pro-Obama bias in there already: assigning blame to Obama for the current economy when he’s been in office for nine weeks just seems harsh to most people. But just because they (correctly) don’t blame him as the primary cause for our current woes, this doesn’t mean for a second that the public endorses his “solutions,” as the Post suggests.
But the Post questioners traveled beyond natural polling for politeness. They wanted to know why we fault these sectors. Is it the corporations “for poor management decisions”? Is it the banks, for “taking unnecessary risks”? Did consumers take on “too much debt”?
These are fair descriptions, I think we can say. But now check how they identified the problem when it was a politician: Should the public blame Bush for “inadequate regulation of the financial industry”? Or is Obama to blame for “not doing enough to turn the economy around”?
…The Post drew the numbers they wanted: While every other politician and group was blamed “a great deal or a good amount” for the downturn by at least 70 percent in the poll, Obama was only blamed to that extent by 26 percent.
And so they can say that America is behind the President.
A result they forgot to mention:
Then there were poll questions that the Post editors didn’t want on the front page — or even anywhere in the poll story by political reporter Dan Balz and pollster Jon Cohen. On the front page, Post readers saw the big news — a bar graph showing that 60 percent approve of how Obama is handling the economy. But if you look at the Internet and read the actual poll, there’s another number the Post deliberately left out. Pollsters asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the federal government’s overall response to the economic situation?” Forty-nine percent said they supported the overall federal government response.
So who, boys and girls, is the “federal government? It’s controlled by a Democratic president, and a strongly Democratic Congress. One could clearly state, then, that less than half of the public supports President Obama’s economic agenda. But the Post ignored this so as to trumpet the opposite.
See the poll here.
Sounds more like image management than an honest assessment of peoples’ attitudes. Millions will read about this biased poll online. How many pixels have been sacrificed in this exercise in public relations? Save the pixel! Ignore polls with an agenda.
Justbkuz 