Palin Says Obama Health Plan is "Evil"
That was the headline in the story I found this morning in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called President Barack Obama's health plan "downright evil" Friday in her first online comments since leaving office, saying in a Facebook posting that he would create a "death panel" that would deny care to the neediest Americans.
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," the former Republican vice presidential candidate wrote.
As is often the case in print these days, the full article got posted on the web, but for the print version, the editors only used the top third of it. At least they kept the most important part of the entire piece, but naturally it was the very last sentence in what was retained.
The claim that the Democratic health care bills would encourage euthanasia has been circulating on the Internet for weeks and has been echoed by some Republican leaders. Democrats from Obama on down have dismissed it as a distortion. The nonpartisan group FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania says the claim is false.
So here's my question for the AP and for the editors at the Chronicle:
Why doesn't the headline read:
Independent Fact Check says Palin Health Care Claims are False or
Palin Claim About Obama Plan Debunked or.....
Write your own here!
The media is once again doing an absolutely horrible job with informing the public about the issues involved in health insurance reform. As usual, the focus is on personalities and charges and raucous town hall confrontations and not on the facts.
But worst of all is the fact that when the "facts" put forth by opponents are not facts but flat out lies, and labeled as such by recognized, reputable third-party fact checkers like Politifact and Truthout, the AP and editors like those at the Chron don't see that as what a story like this one is really all about.
You are being lied to and the AP and the Chron are helping that cause by not only burying the fact that this is a lie inside the story, but using the Palin charge as the headline of the article. So the average reader, scanning through their morning paper reads literally the first three paragraphs of the edited AP piece, all of which are focused on Palin's claims.
I have posted elsewhere my fury over CNN's actions on the "birther" story, opening a segment by reading off a litany of sources, independent and political and from both sides of the spectrum, all of them saying they have studied the facts in great detail and Obama is clearly an American citizen. And then swinging right from there to interview Alan Keyes????!!!!!! Keyes then rants that nobody has shown him convincing proof. And also on the segment was Orly Taitz, whose absolutely ridiculous efforts to push the story drove her to push a forged birth certificate so clearly Photoshopped it became a rapid internet laughingstock.
And let me close with my other question to the media: Where is your responsibility to draw a line as to whether you give airtime to such obvious whack jobs? Their claims are already clearly debunked. They have been caught trying to fabricate evidence. And yet you feel they deserve to get airtime and print space, and headlines which give those lies a degree of credibility they so desperately want but have so clearly abused. Stop it. Tell the dam...ed truth.
If someone is lying....THAT is the story...not the lie itself!!!!!.
Do you feel a new set of rules for journalistic integrity are needed in today's world of spin and obfuscation? If so, what should they be?