Health care, the media and public opinion

People have a remarkable ability to believe what they want to believe, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Recent media coverage of political debate on the "public option" for health care reform is a case in point. A review of the nightly programs on the liberal MSNBC - including those of Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Matthews - shows that all of these hosts cited public opinion as supportive of the Obama health care plan at some point during the week of July 15th to 21st. Conversely, every pundit-based program on Fox News's feature lineup - including those from Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Bret Baier, and Glenn Beck, cited public opinion as overwhelmingly opposed to the public option. Critics of Obama's public option have no difficulty distorting public opinion data to fit their own prejudices. A prominent example is the July 19th Meet the Press, in which guest Michele Norris of NPR's All Things Considered argued that "some 90 percent of the people who voted [in 2008] actually have health insurance and three-quarters of them are satisfied with what they got. And there's different ways of looking at that. And one way to look at that is to say that perhaps there is not the public mandate for this that would dictate this sort of rush to legislation." Wall Street Journal editorial writer Paul Gigot agreed with Norris' claim in the roundtable Meet the Press discussion, maintaining that Obama "is making the same mistake that he made on the stimulus…he's governing from the left…That's why you see these extraordinary costs and extraordinary taxes. There is a better way to govern through the center, the way Bill Clinton did on welfare reform…But [Obama] won't do that because he knows that will upset his political left."