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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Trudy Lieberman

1. February 25, 2011 11:02 AM

   “Tweaking” Health Reform

   Who pays the price for the changes?

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Lost in MSM coverage of the president’s budget and hype over a government shutdown has been reportage about the various “tweaks” to the health reform law. Kudos to Merrill Goozner of the Fiscal Times, Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, and Timothy Jost writing for Kaiser Health News, for their enlightening commentaries. Who will pay the price for these changes? Why,...

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2. March 3, 2011 12:48 PM

   A Big Omission at NBC

   Whatever happened to Social Security?

   By Trudy Lieberman

   NBC Nightly News took on retirement income the other day and found most Americans’s savings will come up short. The segment drew a bleak picture of the amount of money people have saved for retirement versus the amount they will need in the future. The picture was bleaker still because the story left out any reference to Social Security—even though...

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3. August 31, 2012 11:00 AM

   A dart to the AP—and a laurel!

   Good work on fact-checking speeches; on Social Security, not so much

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Dart The Associated Press misled its many readers, unfortunately, about what is a Social Security benefit cut and what is not. A piece published August 27, one in a series the AP has been running, purports to break new ground in gauging public sentiment about the government’s largest social program. In other polls, the AP said, “most of the...

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4. April 11, 2011 12:35 PM

   A Good Social Security Story—At Last

   Reuters shows it can be done

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Last week Reuters sent out a fine piece by Emily Kaiser that helped readers understand what the Social Security fight is all about by giving them enough context and history to get the gist of the debate—if it can be called that—and moving beyond the one-sided framing that has characterized almost all of the reportage over the past fifteen months....

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5. July 18, 2011 02:33 PM

   A Medicare Miss at the LA Times

   Some fact-checking, please

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Medicare is a bear to write about. It’s tough for beneficiaries to understand, and unclear news stories only serve to compound their confusion. That’s what last week’s LA Times story on Medicare costs did. The paper’s thesis was that seniors’ medical bills “could jump hundreds or even thousands of dollars,” and the top supported that storyline. A Medicare expert from...

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6. January 25, 2011 01:00 PM

   A Shout Out to David Gregory

   For pinning down Eric Cantor on Meet the Press

   By Trudy Lieberman

   David Gregory’s Meet the Press interview Sunday with new House Majority Leader Eric Cantor should be required reading in every entry-level reporting class. Gregory showed what it means to follow up on questions and keep pushing until the interviewee answers the question that was asked. That kind of follow-up has been lacking in much of the reportage I have examined...

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7. January 26, 2011 11:47 AM

   Andrea Mitchell Crosses the Line

   By Trudy Lieberman

   NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was bummed out yesterday on her show, Andrea Mitchell Reports, when Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, announced the five-year discretionary spending freeze. Apparently Barnes’s words did not sit well with Mitchell, who thought the administration should be tougher on the contributions entitlements make to the deficit. Said Mitchell: I think you’ve just...

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8. December 31, 2010 11:37 AM

   Best of 2010: Trudy Lieberman

   Lieberman picks her top stories from 2010

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Social Security in the Heartland series: All year the media ignored how “fixes” to Social Security pushed by political elites would affect ordinary folks. The nine profiles of people living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, tell the tale. Our New Year’s wish is for the media to pay attention to people like them. More Words of Wisdom from Alan Simpson: As co-chair...

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9. January 2, 2012 05:48 PM

   Best of 2011: Trudy Lieberman

   CJR's health and entitlements reporter picks her top stories from the past year

   By Trudy Lieberman

   Peter G. Peterson Goes to School: Organizations funded by Peter G. Peterson, a former Wall Street investment banker and long-time foe of Social Security, have had a powerful influence in shaping this year’s debate over Social Security. The media have liberally quoted representatives of these Peterson-funded groups. The website Remapping Debate took a deep look at one Peterson-funded activity—the creation...

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10. April 19, 2011 09:47 AM

    Chipping Away at Health Reform

    Some not-so-great news for consumers

    By Trudy Lieberman

    The health reform law, aka the Affordable Care Act, took a hit last week. Many journos, though, were apparently snoozing. In a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists, Washington and Lee University law professor Timothy Jost revealed that the president had just signed a bill giving the business community a present it had been...

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11. April 20, 2011 10:08 AM

    Chipping Away at Health Reform, Part II

    Ron Wyden’s lost program

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Throughout the health care debate, Oregon senator Ron Wyden worried whether Americans who will be required to buy health insurance would be able to afford it. In an interview with Campaign Desk a few months before the law passed, Wyden told us that many people will have no choice but to take the penalty for not buying coverage because they...

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12. April 8, 2011 12:01 PM

    Covering Medicare Archive

    A complete archive of Trudy Lieberman's "Covering Medicare" articles

    By Trudy Lieberman

    This is an archive of Trudy Lieberman's "Covering Medicare" articles, presented in descending order. 08/15/12: Medicare, Paul Ryan, and beyond: a primer - Here’s context to clarify the big entitlements debates 08/08/12: What makes Paul Ryan tick? - The New Yorker defines the man who would remake the government 07/27/12: Medicare and misinformation - Is my premium rising? A beat...

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13. January 7, 2011 11:51 AM

    Death Panels Make a Comeback

    And pose some larger questions for the press

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Well, what do you know? The Obama administration has resurrected the topic of death panels—or, as one Pennsylvania man called them in an interview with me, the end-of-life committees. Those were the voluntary counseling sessions doctors were supposed to have with their older patients that delved into the thorny subjects of advance directives and treatment at the end of life....

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14. July 28, 2011 02:54 PM

    Grandparent of the Chained CPI

    Some stories never die

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Sarah Cohen, a professor at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke, and a one-time reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, sent along a story she had written in 1995, another era when there was serious talk of reforming Social Security. “Some stories never die,” she wrote. Sixteen years ago there was talk of privatizing Social Security...

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15. January 18, 2011 12:26 PM

    Health Care Red Meat from Politico

    Business writers, take note

    By Trudy Lieberman

    One of the most illuminating health care stories to come along in the last couple weeks was Politico’s take on the J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference in San Francisco. Politico’s story sang with information. The insurance industry is going to make a killing on health reform. But, then again, we’ve known that ever since the public option was eliminated. The...

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16. September 2, 2010 03:36 PM

    Hospital Safety Series

    An archive of Trudy Lieberman's recurring series on hospital safety

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Here are the links to every entry in Trudy Lieberman's "Keeping an Eye on Hospital Safety" series, presented in descending order. 09/23/11: Keeping an Eye on Patient Safety, Part IV - Sac Bee catches nursing home lies 07/06/11: Keeping an Eye on Patient Safety, Part III - What we can learn from the Brits 03/10/11: Keeping an Eye on Hospital...

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17. June 9, 2011 12:49 PM

    Jon Huntsman’s Vision for the Future of Medicare

    Whose moral obligation is it?

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Potential presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed was thoroughly predictable, containing lots of the acceptable phrases for GOP discourse: stuff about not underestimating the “seriousness of the responsibility,” the need to “make hard decisions now,” “reforming entitlement programs,” Paul Ryan’s attempt “to save” Medicare, “the inescapable reality that we have too few workers supporting too many retirees.”...

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18. March 10, 2011 04:14 PM

    Keeping an Eye on Hospital Safety, Part II

    A shout-out to the Columbia Tribune

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Slowly the public is coming to realize that hospitals are not always safe places. When the Institute of Medicine published its landmark study “To Err is Human” a decade ago, pointing out the ubiquitous problem of medical errors in the U.S., the press yawned. Since then, though, a grassroots patient safety movement has blossomed, and the media’s interest has grown...

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19. July 6, 2011 01:37 PM

    Keeping an Eye on Patient Safety, Part III

    What we can learn from the Brits

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Slowly the public is coming to realize that hospitals are not always safe places. Since the Institute of Medicine published its landmark study on unsafe medical care more than a decade ago, a grassroots patient safety movement has blossomed. This is the third in a series of posts that will examine what the media are doing to report on patient...

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20. May 2, 2011 09:59 AM

    Kudos to Remapping Debate

    A refreshing take on a long-legged health reform story

    By Trudy Lieberman

    James Lardner deserves a loud shout-out for his piece about the movement—somewhat dormant until now—to make patients into consumers, meaning that they should pay more for their health insurance and be crackerjack shoppers to boot. That’s called “having more skin in the game” in the health care vernacular, meaning that if people have to pay more out-of-pocket, they will use...

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