Journalism Should Have an Important Role
to play in the debate we're about to have about the national health care system. If today's front-page article in the New York Times is any indication, it will serve to seriously distort that debate.
We know from the last time around that the health care providers and the health insurers will flood the media with their point of view. They'll do this by press release, by advertisement, and most of all by making their expertise available. Good journalists will pay attention to them skeptically and balance that agenda-driven subsidized information with stuff driven by other agendas or by academic (and therefore supposedly neutral) expertise (though who knows how many academic health economists, say, are really neutral).
The BEST journalists, though--the ones with the most initiative and the most resources--will try to set their own agenda. They'll do this by doing "enterprise" journalism. Last time around, that meant going to Canada and finding a story. That story will always be about a breakdown: long lines at hospital emergency rooms, denial of service to needy people, long waits for non-urgent procedures, people driving to Buffalo to get heart surgery, and so forth. Heaven knows there are enough stories to go around.
To an expert, all of that journalism will be "anecdotal evidence." So the BEST journalists, who want to pay serious attention to the experts, will contextualize their stories, maybe not in the first five paragraphs, but somewhere in the article. They'll do this by talking to experts. But the best journalists will carefully balance their experts, in order to represent BOTH legitimate points of view. I say "both" because two is the easiest number to balance, and because two fits the general mindset of professional journalism, which is oriented around the electoral process (the 2-party system) and the legislative process (you're either for it or agin' it). Because the initial story will be about a dysfunction, the two points of view will be "it matters" and "it doesn't matter." In the world of journalism, "it matters" always wins.
So the BEST journalists are going to produce a file of articles that cumulatively scare the public--or, more precisely, make the legislators believe the public has been scared--off from serious reform. That's what happened last time.
If you want serious reform, you'll have to hope that a movement for it appears, and that it drives the agenda. You can't expect journalism--especially the BEST journalism--to stand in for it.
to play in the debate we're about to have about the national health care system. If today's front-page article in the New York Times is any indication, it will serve to seriously distort that debate.
We know from the last time around that the health care providers and the health insurers will flood the media with their point of view. They'll do this by press release, by advertisement, and most of all by making their expertise available. Good journalists will pay attention to them skeptically and balance that agenda-driven subsidized information with stuff driven by other agendas or by academic (and therefore supposedly neutral) expertise (though who knows how many academic health economists, say, are really neutral).
The BEST journalists, though--the ones with the most initiative and the most resources--will try to set their own agenda. They'll do this by doing "enterprise" journalism. Last time around, that meant going to Canada and finding a story. That story will always be about a breakdown: long lines at hospital emergency rooms, denial of service to needy people, long waits for non-urgent procedures, people driving to Buffalo to get heart surgery, and so forth. Heaven knows there are enough stories to go around.
To an expert, all of that journalism will be "anecdotal evidence." So the BEST journalists, who want to pay serious attention to the experts, will contextualize their stories, maybe not in the first five paragraphs, but somewhere in the article. They'll do this by talking to experts. But the best journalists will carefully balance their experts, in order to represent BOTH legitimate points of view. I say "both" because two is the easiest number to balance, and because two fits the general mindset of professional journalism, which is oriented around the electoral process (the 2-party system) and the legislative process (you're either for it or agin' it). Because the initial story will be about a dysfunction, the two points of view will be "it matters" and "it doesn't matter." In the world of journalism, "it matters" always wins.
So the BEST journalists are going to produce a file of articles that cumulatively scare the public--or, more precisely, make the legislators believe the public has been scared--off from serious reform. That's what happened last time.
If you want serious reform, you'll have to hope that a movement for it appears, and that it drives the agenda. You can't expect journalism--especially the BEST journalism--to stand in for it.
posted by jnerone at 3:54 PM
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