This morning I read one of the most blatantly right wing newspaper articles I have seen in a long time, by Charles Pope, the Oregonian's Washington D.C. correspondent. The article, titled "Thousands flood capitol to protest health care bill as Democrats predict passage," has not an ounce of journalistic integrity. As is common practice in the media these days, the article legitimizes a right wing point of view because the author refuses to ask any hard questions of the people involved, and worse, fails to inform his readers about the actual facts surrounding the story. This is part of the reason why people have stopped subscribing to newspapers, and why I would find it extremely hard to ever purchase a subscription to the Oregonian, whose controlling interests continue to print conservative dribble by the likes of Rich Lowry and others who insist on ignoring the failures of Republican ideology in lieu of playing attack politics for the singular purpose of winning elections.
(Don't you idiots remember the last eight years and the absolute disasters of the conservative agenda?! Lets not forget that it was a Republican controlled government that got us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulated the housing and financial markets leading to their consequent collapse and massive government bailouts of the banks, and turned Bill Clinton's budget surplus into massive deficit spending, most of which is owned by China. These right wingers remind me of the women that return to their husbands after being beaten to within an inch of their lives time and time again. WAKE UP! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NUTS!!!)
Inaccuracy and bad reporting abound in Pope's article. For one, he states that "thousands of protestors descended on the U.S. capitol," and later characterizes the crowd as "large and energized" and "from every corner of the nation." I thought this was supposed to be a news article, not a narrative--how many is "thousands," what does "large" mean, and wouldn't we expect that protesters would be "energized"--isn't that the very nature of a protest? So essentially, in the first two paragraphs, instead of asking pertinent questions, such as, "why, specifically, are you protesting?" or "who organized this protest?" Pope elected instead to lend the protest credibility, based not on information he gathered, but rather on his own observations, which are biased and unspecific.
When he does finally find someone to talk to, its "Kerry Rietmann, a 54-year-old wheat farmer from Ione, Ore., population 350." Rietmann, according to the article, called Thursday's protest, "the most beautiful experience of my life" (not the birth of a child, her wedding day, or other transcendent life moment, but rather, this tea party event to protest health care--really?) and in Pope's words, is "worried about the direction of the county and, in her view, its movement toward a heavy-handed socialist government that will sap freedom and opportunity." But wait a second, Reitmann is a wheat farmer right? What about the fact that according to the US Department of Agriculture, wheat farmers collectively receive about $1.2 billion in government subsidies per year? (1) Is Rietmann against that kind of "heavy-handed socialist government" program? Did U.S. taxpayer money pay some part of the $773 plane ticket she purchased to take part in this protest? No, no, Pope refuses to ask these sorts of questions--he is content to treat Reitmann's concerns as legitimate, even though she directly benefits from a government program that does exactly the kind of thing she and the other teabaggers are criticizing in the proposed health care bill.
While I would like to write here that the article got even worse, unlike Pope I have integrity, and the plain fact is that it isn't possible. Instead he just offers up his print space as a blank canvas for the same kind of ridiculous rhetoric that's designed to rile up foolish people like Reitmann, but when analized, doesn't really mean anything.
For instance, one of the paragraphs in Pope's story is a stand alone quote by Representative John Boehner, "This bill is the greatest threat to freedom I've seen in my 19 years in Washington." Boehner was in office during the Bush administration's assault on the 1st, 4th, and 8th amendments, yet a healthcare bill that is meant to expand coverage to poor people and strip health insurance companies of an antitrust exemption is a threat to freedom? Why didn't Pope ask a Democrat or even an intelligent political insider about Boehner's comment and its meaning?
The same type of uncritical reporting occurs again later, when Pope interviews Oregon Representative Greg Walden, who is quoted as saying, when asked about the protestors, "Heck, their angry, and they have a right to be. Their health care is about to be taken away from them. Their kids are about to handed an enormous debt." Here we might expect a responsible reporter to point out to the Representative that Congressional Budget Office estimates that as of yesterday the proposed bill would reduce the federal deficit by "$129 billion dollars over the 2010-2019 period."(2) Now that may not be a huge margin of reduction, but it doesn't excuse the fact that Walden lied; and this is not even to address his bogus assertion that passage of the bill equates to people losing their healthcare.
It is only at the end of the article that Pope discusses the actual big news of the day, which is that the American Medical Association, along with the AARP, both announced their support for the legislation. Of course, if one simply read the headline and the first few paragraphs, they might miss this development entirely. Then again, even if they read the entire article they would have been horribly misled about the current healthcare legislation's actual ramifications.
The Oregonian should either fire Charles Pope or force him to write a retraction, outlining all of the mistakes he made in writing this story. Probably both. As long as media outlets continue to run these kinds of biased stories, they will continue to legitimize the conservative "do-nothing" agenda, and their readership will continue to drop.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_subsidies
(2) http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/107xx/doc10706/hr3962Dingell_with_mgr_amendment.pdf
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