This morning, Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at WaPo, with contributions from Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery, tried to get us to believe that the Administration was taken by surprise by progressives’ insistence on a viable PO being included in the Health Care Reform bill. This is an interpretation beyond naive, and also beyond imagination, since it assumes that this White House has no one monitoring the netroots and the blogosphere. Who do they think they’re writing about, George Bush? I think this WaPo piece communicates clearly the following messages.
1) If this is really the reaction over there, the President and his staff may as well have said to the public: “watch what we say because we’re either just plain stupid, or just plain dishonest.” After all, for the Administration to claim that it did not know that there were 93 co-sponsors in the House of Jon Conyers’ Medicare for All bill, and that for them and for progressive organizations like Move-on, the PO was their pre-compromise, offered up reluctantly because the Administration wanted it and insisted that “single-payer” wasn’t feasible, is to stretch credibility. How much did the Administration think the progressives would give away to the Republicans and the Blue Dogs before digging in and saying no? Didn’t they see the anger already out there in reaction to having been pressured to give away single-payer and support the PO, without serious consultation with the mass of progressives?
2) We at WaPo approach the Administration’s statements with wide-eyed, mind-bending naivety. We’ll believe anything they tell us and never report any critical perspectives on it from the left, including the perspective that the Administration must have known that progressives thought the PO was now the bottom line on HCR. On the other hand, many things we’ve written in the past are full of right-wing talking points and narratives.
Don’t they know what Ed Schultz, KO, and Rachel say on MSNBC anytime they talk about health care? Don’t they have anybody monitoring the netroots? Don’t any folks over there read Huff Post, or Daily Kos, or Open Left, or Firedog Lake?
3) Now that progressives have protested against our movement away from the public option, we in the Administration will start to marginalize them with comments like:
“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their waterloo . . . we’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health care reform. . . It is a mystifying thing . . . We’re forgetting why we’re in this.”
Geeeee, this is so “mystifying.” After all, how can one expect the White House to know that, from the progressive point of view, as Jane Hamsher says: “The Public Option is the compromise”? How can they be expected to know that the progressives only compromised on “Medicare for All” and agreed not to fight to the death for their preferred HR 676, John Conyers’ Medicare for All bill, only because they were told that the PO provided an incremental path to Medicare for All over a period of years, and that they never would have supported the President’s approach to HCR at all, if they had not believed in this incremental path toward single-payer? Even more, how can the White House be expected to know that the progressives are “in this” to provide guaranteed universal health care to all Americans with no denials of access, no rescissions, at a cost that every American can afford, and with cost controls that make the resulting health care insurance system sustainable?
Well, the answer to these questions is that the White House could be expected to know all these things because they: talk to progressive Senators and Representatives, examine their campaign literature, talk to leaders and members of progressive voluntary associations, and keep up with progressive blogs and social networking sites. In fact, the idea that this is mystifying is a pure BS narrative that the Administration is putting out to try to marginalize the progressive position. Their claim of being in a state of mystification is a pure lie.
They know exactly why the progressives are livid, and they knew they’d get a strong reaction from them when they said that the PO wasn’t “essential,” but they wanted to gauge the strength of that reaction, and to see just how far the progressives could be pushed if the Administration made even more compromises in its continuing search for Blue Dog and Republican support. Make no mistake, the Administration is in this to get a bill, any bill it can spin at places like WaPo; it is not after what the progressives are after. The Administration and progressive goals are different and somewhat divergent. The Administration has recognized this from the beginning. But many progressives have not. They were duped by the public option strategy. And even now, prisoners of their previous decision to let the President take Medicare for All “off the table,” they draw a line in the sand at their compromise point, rather than at their preferred bill, which is HR 676.
4) We at WaPo will help you to marginalize the progressives by delivering along with collaborators such as Andrea Mitchell, at MSNBC, the message that these silly progressives are so fixated on insisting on the PO, not because they are rational participants in the political process, who are supporting a position that may lead to accomplishing their goals; but rather, only because they have had a knee jerk reaction to conservative attacks on the PO. Since the conservatives have made the PO such an issue, now the petulant and childish members of the “left of the left” simply must have that PO whether it makes sense or not, even at the cost of torpedoing any hope of a health care reform bill in this session.
Well, according to the WaPo/Shear, Connolly, Kornblut, Montgomery, MSNBC/Mitchell centrist party line, the progressives can’t possibly have any good reasons for insisting on a strong public option, such as reasons of principle, or a desire to get meaningful reform accomplished. They can only be motivated by irrational reactions to a change in position by the President, because we know that the progressives are just idealistic children, who don’t have the worldly sophistication of us cynical representatives of the national press elite who know from years and years of experience that nothing really worthwhile can ever be accomplished in Washington. In writing this stuff, I find myself resisting an extremely strong urge to have a shower to get rid of the stink of media corruption that somehow gets transmitted from these “reporters” right through the electronic media to my desk. But I’ll resist the urge until I finish the post.
Day after day, since I live near Washington, I read at least a part of WaPo. And as time goes on, I’ve become more and more disgusted by the way in which its reporters frame and report the News. The old ideals of journalistic objectivity are dead at WaPo. The courage of its glory days is nowhere to be seen. In its place is a devotion to the centrist framing of the political process that is absolutely stifling and useless if one is concerned about the United States successfully adapting to its enormous range of problems.
Today we are all sophisticated enough to know that there is no easy objectivity in Journalism. Every article must be framed in some way. But all of them don’t have to reflect the same disgusting, cynical frame. Within a single article there can be reporting of conflicting points of view that reflect different frames. The meaning of objectivity today in reporting/analysis on political issues is to develop a frame that reflects a number of primary contending frames, and objectivity in analysis requires explicit critiques of these contending frames, and also explicit statements about one’s own frame, so readers can judge for themselves where a reporter or analyst is coming from. Until WaPo develops articles of that kind, it will continue to decline as a Newspaper, and to devolve into a mere mouthpiece assisting various political operatives in brainwashing the public with today’s conventional, insider wisdom. In other words, it will continue to be beneath contempt.