A leading article on FoxNews.com this week is, wait for it, bullish against health care reform. Let me quickly talk about three of the sources it uses to explain why Obama's plan is bad.
"The numbers don't hold up," Grace Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a think tank devoted to health policy, said Thursday.
But the Galen Institute is at least somewhat bought and paid for by the medical-industrial complex. Here's Turner's bio in a McClatchy op-ed she recently wrote:
Grace-Marie Turner is president and founder of the Galen Institute, which is funded in part by the pharmaceutical and medical industries.
Funny how Fox leaves that out.
Next, they cite the Lewin Group, which has been revealed as a subsidiary of insurance company UnitedHealth (but still widely cited by anti-reform conservatives). Shameless, to say the least, that anyone can still consider this a credible source of analysis.
Finally, the cherry on top for Fox is, yes, the Heritage Foundation -- an ultra-partisan radical right-wing organization that exists not so much to buttress conservatism, but as a PR arm for the Republican Party agenda. On the health care issue, Media Matters has dissected a lot of its nonsense this season, and this can be done on issue after issue. Paul Krugman said it best:
Whenever you encounter "research" from the Heritage Foundation, you always have to bear in mind that Heritage isn’t really a think tank; it’s a propaganda shop. Everything it says is automatically suspect.
Considering the motivations and character of Fox News, this is anything but surprising but it's still worth calling out. Leave alone how pathetic it is to pretend to be doing "journalism" while selectively using paid hacks to support your points, it's fairly obvious why anti-reformers are resorting to this type of dishonesty: the truth simply isn't on their side.