Via Digby, through a story by Gitlin and Drier in the Columbia Journalism Review, our liberal media at work, reporting the healthcare debate.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-c... "I Cant Stand Those People!"
by digby
Peter Drier and Todd Gitlin have written an important story in Columbia Journalism Review that will set any media critic's teeth on edge. It's so infuriating to find out what utter creeps the people who decide what you need to know are.
No one packed heat, no one screamed at a member of Congress, no one called anybody a Nazi, no fistfights broke out. So—no story.
All that happened was that on Thursday, Oct. 1, a moving van pulled up in front of the largest house in a Main Line neighborhood just outside Philadelphia—the home of H. Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies—and eight demonstrators from Health Care for America Now (HCAN) got out. One was Stacie Ritter, a former CIGNA customer whose twin girls were afflicted with cancer at the age of four. Their treatment left permanent damage. CIGNA refused to pay for the human growth hormones that her doctor prescribed to help her daughters grow properly. When her husband was briefly unemployed, they were bankrupted.
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Total number of print and broadcast reporters who showed up at any of the three events: Zero.
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They couldn't even buy coverage?
Meanwhile:
“At a certain point,” Indianapolis Star senior editor Jenny Green told us, the demonstrators are “not adding to the debate. They’re just one side saying exactly what you’d expect them to say.”
Her colleague, Greg Weaver, the Star’s deputy public service editor for business, maintained that the raucous town meetings of August, dominated by conservative activists shouting down Democratic Congressmembers, were newsworthy because they “are more of a public forum where you have many sides of the debate, whereas at the
protest you have only one side of the debate.”
<...>
It’s an old story, immortalized in the slogan, “If it bleeds, it leads.” This idea of newsworthiness has the unintended effect of coaxing protest movements toward raising the action ante.
The problem, of course, is that if liberals even slightly raised their voices they'd be tased to within an inch of their lives, if not worse. And if they didn't happen to be middle aged white people, they'd be in real trouble. You know how this works.
I'm not saying that HCAN's methods are necessarily good ones. But the difference between how the newspeople view the two contrived political events is not just a matter of "if it bleeds it leads." The teabaggers are deemed legitimate and the HCAN protesters aren't even though everyone has known from the beginning that the teabaggers were organized via astroturf outfits.
The default is always to Real Americans, no matter how unreal they really are.
