The corporate media is bad for your health

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Greg Sargent has an important post about the failure of the corporate media to inform the public in the healthcare debate, which allowed the corporate forces aligned against the Affordable Care Act (the New York Times tallies it up: $235 million has been spent on ads attacking "Obamacare" since March 2010, versus only $69 million on ads favoring it), to create a narrative that was oft repeated in the media echo chamber.

This in turn created the milieu in which fringe right-wing ideas get mainstreamed, e.g., "death panels," and a conservative activist Justice like Antonin Scalia feels emboldened to legislate his radical political ideology from the bench by rejecting well-established court precedent, even his own opinion. Scalia Changes His Mind on Key Obamacare Precedent.

Greg Sargent writes GOP wims message war over health care:

A number of people are pointing to this big Pew poll today to argue that it shows that Republicans won the message war over health care reform. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is true. But one of the reasons Pew cites for this victory seems particularly interesting:

An analysis by PEJ of the language used in the media (PEJ research) reveals that opponents of the reform won the so-called “messaging war” in the coverage. Terms that were closely associated with opposition arguments, such as “government run,” were far more present in media reports than terms associated with arguments supporting the bill, such as “pre-existing conditions.”

To conduct the analysis, researchers examined and identified three of the most common concepts being pushed by opponents of the bill and the three concepts being promoted by supporters and then examined the news coverage for the presence of those concepts and language. The concepts used by opponents were nearly twice as common as those used by supporters.

Pew finds that the press coverage was also more more preoccupied with the political strategies employed by both sides than it was with the policy specifics of the law itself.

The health law remains unpopular, but as Adam Serwer notes, this study also suggests that the press’s failure to inform Americans about the law may be a key reason why:

Pew describes the situation here as the White House having lost the “messaging war.” It’s also possible that most Americans don’t like the Affordable Care Act, and that more favorable coverage wouldn’t have convinced them otherwise. The phrase “messaging war,” however, seems like a deeply shallow way of saying that most Americans, who are neither health care wonks nor constitutional scholars, believed what they were hearing from the media. Journalists are supposed to separate truth from falsehood, but instead spent the bulk of their resources speculating about “politics and strategy.” This is the result.

it also happens to be true that falsehoods about the law went widely unrebutted in the media. When Politifact pronounced the “government takeover” line its Lie of the Year at the end of 2010, it also took a look at whether media figures rebutted it with any frequency. Politifact’s conclusion:

In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers.

One of the results of this messaging win? Only 18 percent of Americans have a very clear sense of what’s in the law. Victory!

In the event that the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act en toto, and millions of Americans lose the benefits they are currently enjoying under the Act, the fault will lie with the corporate media villagers who toe the corporate line rather than to inform the public, and low information Americans who, often through no fault of their own, rely on the misinformation and political spin produced by the corporate media villagers.