'Truth' vs. 'facts' from America's media Neil Gabler
www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gabler23-2009aug23,0,4834705.storylatimes.com
Opinion
'Truth' vs. 'facts' from America's media
Americans need the media to give us the truth in the healthcare
debate.
By Neal Gabler
August 23, 2009
T.S. Eliot was wrong. August is the cruelest month. As we head toward
next month's congressional face-off on a national healthcare bill,
the news media are infatuated with town hall meetings. Over and over,
we see angry citizens screaming about a Big Government takeover of
the healthcare system, shouting that they will lose their insurance
or be forced to give up their doctors and denouncing "death panels"
that will euthanize old people.
Of course, none of this is even remotely true. These are all canards
peddled by insurance companies terrified of losing their power and
profits, by right-wing militants terrified of a victory for the
president they hate and by the Republican Party, which has been
commandeered by the insurance industry and the militants. But the
lies have obviously had their effect. Recent polls show that support
for healthcare reform -- reform that would insure more Americans,
would force insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions and
prevent them from capriciously terminating coverage, and would
provide competition to drive down costs -- is rapidly eroding.
Maybe Americans should know better. Maybe they shouldn't fall for
the latest imbecilic propaganda and scare tactics. Maybe. But a
citizenry is only as well-informed as the quality of information it
receives. One can't expect Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin
or the Republican Party or even the Democrats to provide serious,
truthful assessments of a complex health plan. Truth has to come from
somewhere else -- from a reliable, objective, trustworthy source.
That source should be the media, and there has been, in fact, some
excellent coverage of healthcare, especially by our better newspapers
and especially lately when the untruths have become a torrent,
rousing reporters to provide a corrective. But overall, the coverage
has not been exactly edifying. According to the Pew Research Center,
16% of the stories in its media sample last week were devoted to
healthcare, but three-quarters of that coverage was either about
legislative politics or the town halls. Tom Rosenstiel, who heads
Pew's Center for Excellence in Journalism, said that if the
healthcare debate is a potential teaching moment, that "moment is
passing us by."
Television particularly has been remiss, even without mentioning
cable news, which may be the greatest source of disinformation. ABC
took some heat from Republicans for giving President Obama a
prime-time forum to answer questions about healthcare in June. But as
far as I can tell, it is the only prime-time special that any
broadcast network has devoted to the healthcare debate. Even so,
rather than merely host the president, ABC should have had a variety
of experts and qualified reporters assessing exactly what the
proposed bills will and will not do and who is and is not telling the
truth -- a difficult but not impossible task.
To look at this in a larger context, journalists would no doubt say
that it isn't really their job to ferret out the "truth." It is their
job to report "facts." If Palin says that Obama intends to euthanize
her child, they report it. If Limbaugh says that Obama's healthcare
plan smacks of Nazism, they report it. And if riled citizens begin
shouting down their representatives, they report it, and report it,
and report it. The more noise and the bigger the controversy, the
greater the coverage. This creates a situation in which not only is
the truth subordinate to lies, but one in which shameless lies are
actually privileged over reasoned debate.
Don't think the militants don't know this and take full advantage of
it. They know that the media, especially the so-called liberal
mainstream media -- which are hardly liberal if assessed honestly --
refrain from attempting to referee arguments for fear that they will
be accused by the right of taking sides. So rather than be battered,
the media -- and I am talking about the respectable media, not the
carnival barkers on cable -- increasingly strive for the simplest
sort of balance rather than real objectivity. They marshal facts, but
they don't seek truth. They behave as if every argument must be heard
and has equal merit, when some are simply specious. That is how
global warming, WMD and "end of life" counseling have become part of
silly reportorial ping-pong at best and badly misleading information
at worst.
All of this is even more relevant given the death of media oracle
Walter Cronkite several weeks ago. He achieved his legendary status,
as many have observed, not because he was the reassuring avuncular
voice of America, blandly reading the news, but because he was often
its truth teller, upsetting our complacency. It was Cronkite who
visited Vietnam and declared it a stalemate when nearly everyone else
in the news media was gung-ho. And it was Cronkite who decided to
take the Washington Post's reporting on Watergate and devote 14
minutes of his broadcast to it, thus dragging it from the sidelines
into the national conversation. The truth is also relevant in light
of a recent online poll that showed Jon Stewart as the nation's most
trusted newsman. Stewart is, of course, a comedian, and the news
media's incapacity to tell the truth, along with the idiocies and
hypocrisies of our political leadership, are his running joke. What
he does to politicians and to the media is exactly what the media
should be doing to politicians and to one another.
It was because we didn't have a committed, truth-telling media that
the country marched happily into Iraq, with tragic consequences that
should have been foreseen. As media analyst Michael Massing
discovered in his study of the prewar coverage, virtually the entire
media, except for the McClatchy papers, reported the administration's
rationale without devoting more than a few sentences or minutes to
dissenting voices, much less doing their own analysis. It was because
we didn't have a committed, truth-telling media that the country
plunged off the economic cliff with so little warning. And it may
very well be because we don't have a committed, truth-telling media
that we will fail to get the healthcare reform we so desperately
need.
Why don't we get the truth? Part of it, as I've said, is fear -- fear
that if journalists dispel the rumors they will be bashed by the
right, which is implacably against the president's reforms no matter
how much sense they make. Part of it is a lack of expertise. Most
reporters are not equipped to quickly and authoritatively tell truth
from spin on an issue such as healthcare. And part of it, frankly, is
sheer laziness.
Telling the truth requires shoe leather. It requires digging up
facts that aren't being handed to you, talking to experts, thinking
hard about what you find. This isn't easy. It takes time and energy
as well as guts, especially when there are conflicting studies, as
there are on healthcare. But finally, we may not have a journalism of
truth because we haven't demanded one. Many of us are invested in one
side of the story; we are for Obama or against him, for healthcare
reform or against it. These are a priori positions. Truth won't
change them.
Yet the danger of not insisting on the truth in a brave new world of
constant lies is that it subjects our policies to whichever side
shouts the loudest or has the most money to spend to mislead us. That
is likely to lead to disastrous governance: a needless war, a great
recession, a continuation of a failing healthcare system.
What it comes down to is that sometimes the media have to tell the
truth not because anyone really wants them to but because it is the
right thing to do -- the essential thing to do -- for the sake of our
democracy.
Neal Gabler is the author, most recently, of "Walt Disney: The
Triumph of the American Imagination."
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
Shawn P. Fitzgibbons 
