The Media Health Care Reform Push Back

The mainstream media is mounting a serious push against health care reform and the reasons are fairly obvious. For starters, I won't even address Fox News as the entire channel is affected by ODS or, Obama Derangement Syndrome, and it can no longer be considered part of the mainstream (if it ever was). Fox News aside, the mainstream media is simply reflecting the political leanings of their corporate owners. That's also a given.

What is interesting about this push back is that the journalists and anchors themselves are starting to weigh in on the subject. This can be seen in the type of questions they ask, the way they choose to frame the issue, the type of people they choose to interview and not interview. It's amazing to me how, for example, the single payer option, which is the most favored by the American people, is not even on the table, let alone being discussed.

What we are left with then is the so called "public option," already a compromise position which, ironically, is being framed as the liberal, extreme left position; Andrea Mitchell (right), the sleeper right winger posing as a moderate on MSNBC, just labeled it as such while commenting on President Obama's remarks this afternoon. Who would have known that those who kept repeating that the United States is a center/right country, are now the ones accusing the majority of Americans favoring the public option as extremely liberal.

The main reason why these TV personalities (the Chuck Todds and Lou Dobbses), and political pundits (the David Brookses and Pat Buchanans) are beginning to push back on health care reform is because they, with their multi million dollar contracts, are the ones who will lose when health care reform is passed. They are the people with the wasteful cadillac health care plans, the ones who might have to pay the surtax to help cover uninsured Americans, and the ones who might end up losing their cadillac plans if their employer chooses to go "public."

Next time you hear those pundits and TV personalities frame health care reform unfavorably, please remember that they are doing it for their own narrow self interest, which is the interest of the top 5% of income earners who want to maintain the status quo. Never mind that the rest of America is getting crushed by the skyrocketing cost of health care; by a system that is designed to deny care rather than provide it; by an industry whose paramount concern is, as with all for-profit industries, maximizing profit instead of helping people stay healthy.

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