In September, WNYC, a New York public radio station, along with the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, conducted a poll to see what New Jersey voters thought of healthcare. When voters were asked whom they trusted more in matters related to health insurance, 44 percent chose the private market; 35 percent said the government. But when they asked voters if they wanted to continue with the current government-provided Medicare system or move to a voucher plan, 69 percent preferred Medicare, with only 25 percent choosing the voucher system. Voters under 30 expressed similar preferences.
“Oh, how we are conflicted about healthcare,” WNYC’s premier talker, Brian Lehrer, told his listeners.
Indeed we are, and therein lies a tall task for the media—to dive into the education part of the beat, as implementation of healthcare reform and the fiscal cliff loom ahead.
Related stories:
Medicare and the $716 billion “cut”
Medicare: Paul Ryan and beyond
I am surprised that anyone doing media analysis for CJR continues to use a loaded, biased and essentially meaningless term like "elite media." Are you referring to the NYT and WSJ? Is the LA Times elite or just "special?" It's a lazy grouping with no real definition. It also carries with it tremendous political baggage since it is used primarily by right-wing broadcasters like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to encompass any media outlet that criticizes or disagrees with Republican and Tea Party positions. It's a grossly generalized and derogatory term and should not be used on a supposedly "fair and balanced" media site w/o reference to that context.
#1 Posted by Jassa Skott, CJR on Thu 15 Nov 2012 at 04:53 PM
Good piece by Trudy. I think Mitt Romney and the Republicans successfully obscured the dramatic impact of their Medicare voucher plan by pushing the bogus message that President Obama and the Dems had cut $716 billion from Medicare benefits. It's very very easy to demagogue Medicare and health care issues because most Americans simply don't understand this stuff, unfortunately. Some in the media tried gamely to explain this but when politicians engage in this dangerous and irresponsible game, it's hard to fix the damage.
That said, I don't think the media did a good job laying out the implications of the GOP voucher plan, how it would affect beneficiaries' out of pocket costs, and how it would drive traditional Medicare into a death spiral. The problem is that explaining this would require media folks to engage in extrapolation, analysis, and educated speculation about the likely effects. And most reporters are either loathe to do that or else not well-informed enough to do it. Especially when the Republicans refused to provide details of their proposal.
Media folks mostly also refused to look at the big picture, that Republicans have been hostile to Medicare from the beginning and see the voucher approach as a way to phase out the social insurance foundation of the program and turn it into a means-tested, privatized welfare program which would have shrinking political support. Reporters and pundits refused to recognize that since the Republicans were looking to Medicare for big budget savings, the only way they could do that would be to squeeze the voucher payments and force beneficiaries to pay more and more out of pocket, even under the newer Ryan version of vouchers. The media were simply unwilling to put two and two together because they were terrified of being accused of liberal bias, hence they engaged in lots of false balance and false equivalence.
#2 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Thu 15 Nov 2012 at 05:27 PM
"But then came October. A few days before the election, a Reuters /Ipsos poll discovered that voters over age 50 continued to prefer Mitt Romney, and liked his position on healthcare and Medicare better than Obama’s. Voters 65 and older “leaned heavily toward Romney throughout the campaign,” reported Politico, while The Hill concluded that Medicare, “once seen as the most potent weapon in House Democrats’ campaign arsenal, is turning out to be a dud.”"
It's instructive to go back to that time to see why the Obama people were finding that line a dud. Hint? Etch-a-sketch:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?_r=3&pagewanted=5
"Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing. What became clear was that voters had almost no sense of Obama’s opponent. While conducting a different focus group — this one with non-college-educated Milwaukee voters on the eve of Wisconsin’s April 3 primary — Burton and Sweeney were surprised to learn that even after Romney had spent months campaigning, many in the group could not recognize his face, much less characterize his positions...
That left an opening for the Democrats to tell Romney’s story, and over the spring they figured out how to do so. Obama’s opponent was not an ideologue per se, the Priorities team decided, but instead someone who knows and cares only about wealthy Americans. Burton describes the distinction as “a top/bottom rather than left/right approach” — also known in Republican circles as class warfare.
The best explanatory tool for this narrative would prove to be Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital."
People were primed to believe Obamacare was socialism/facism/taking money out of medicare to give to the blah-s. They knew Obama was changing things, hell he ran on it, so the republicans simply defined that change as evil redistribution. People were willing to believe myths about Obama.
Mitt represented 'not change, everything reset to the way it was'. He was bringing the old country back. Therefore when voters were confronted with his radical policy ideas, they refused to believe. Moderate Mitt, the one seen in the first Obama debate who did not exist during the primaries, dominated public perception until the Obama people told the story Gingrich started.
Bain = Pain. 47%
That defined his character.
Legitimate rape.
That defined his party.
It's important to inform the public about policies and their impacts, but it's more important to define why people made those policies and who they are.
The republicans defined Obama, which made it easy to slander his policies believably.
Until the Obama team did the same to Romney, nobody believed them.
They rationalized it as "Mitt selling his base. The real Mitt is a moderate."
You can't just report the facts, facts alone aren't meaningful. You have to tell a story.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 16 Nov 2012 at 01:58 PM