Are the Media “Distorting the Voice of the People” on Health Care?

posted at 9:16 am on September 3, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Healthcare ]   

The quoted portion of this post’s title is itself a title — of a column by the reliably liberal, reliably biased E. J. Dionne in today’s Washington Post. The question raised in my title is a reaction to Dionne’s post, which claims the media have been playing dirty all summer in their coverage of the health care debate.

“There is an overwhelming case,” he writes, “that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view ‘boring’) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents” at town halls this past August. Overwhelming seems a little strong in light of the polls, which conclusively demonstrate that more Americans oppose (49% according to Gallup) than support (43%) health care reform. The poll results also quash Dionne’s wishful speculation that “most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt.”

But there is another aspect of Dionne’s post that deserves some attention — namely, his claim of media bias. If memory serves me correctly, the Washington Post, the paper Dionne writes for, was pretty slanted in Obama’s favor during the election. So were virtually all the electronic media Dionne now castigates for painting a distorted picture.

Interesting take on the media then: They are just fine when they support liberals’ point of view, but they are evil when they do not . . . and presumably should be silenced. I suppose liberals would be happier if the country had state-run media á la various Communist dictatorships that they admire so much.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

Blowback