Video of people yelling about health care may make for good television, but it makes for lousy journalism. It exaggerates the numbers and significance of the people who yell the loudest, whichever side they're on. (And this should go without saying, but a shaky cell-phone video that shows a half-dozen of the hundred people at a meeting, and that was provided by people who are trying to "artificially inflate" their numbers, is not a particularly reliable indication of what happened at that meeting.)
So, basically, there's no real value in reporting on polls or protests. How should news organizations cover health care reform?
Simple: Cover health care reform.
All those polls showing that people hold contradictory views and false -- or at least highly questionable -- beliefs about health care and efforts to reform it are a pretty good indication of what reporters should be doing: Reporting the truth, and doing it often. Giving people the facts about health care and about proposals to reform it.
When you see people yelling, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," that's a pretty good indication that the public could use some solid facts. How many people do you think know that health care reform with a strong public option would cost taxpayers less than a plan without such an option? I would bet that a distressingly large number of members of Congress don't know that -- and that very, very few voters do.
People are understandably confused and unfamiliar with the facts -- there are an awful lot of people spending an awful lot of money to confuse them and keep them in the dark. And they don't have the time or the resources to sort through it all and find out whether reform would mean that a government bureaucrat is really going to show up at their door and tell them it's time to die in order to save taxpayers money. (No: That would not happen.)
As Brendan Nyhan notes, the media bear significant responsibility for this confusion:
Who's to blame for this problem? I largely fault the media. ... [I]t's extremely difficult to myth-proof a bill or to effectively counter these claims once they are made. Until the media stops giving airtime and column inches to proponents of misinformation, the playbook is going to keep working.
Nyhan doesn't go quite far enough, though. The media should not only stop giving airtime and column inches to liars and the lies they tell, they should affirmatively and aggressively report the truth. And they need to do so over and over again. Once is not enough. (To those who would respond that repetition is, by definition, not "news": Are you really prepared to argue that newscasts and newspapers don't repeat the same ideas over and over again? Really?)
If news organizations want to produce health care reporting that actually has some value, some utility to their readers and viewers, they'll forget about the polls and the protests and the politics and focus on making the actual facts about health care, and efforts to change the system, as clear as they can.
I know what many journalists will say: This is how things are. Political intrigue, controversy, polling, strategy, demonstrations -- these are the things the media cover. That's how it works.
No. That's how it doesn't work. That's how we have a public that is so badly confused about health care reform that polling on the topic is basically a useless bundle of contradictory results. That's how we have a situation in which more than half of the Republican Party doesn't know Barack Obama was born in the United States. And how is this approach working for the media? Public trust in and respect for journalists is not exactly strong -- and, as I'm sure most reporters have noticed, news organizations across the country are shedding employees in a desperate struggle to stay afloat.
So who are the old ways working for?
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