"Dems scramble after warning from health insurers"
That’s the headline.
But that’s not the story.
WASHINGTON – Insurance companies aren't playing nice any more. Their dire message that health care legislation will drive up premiums for people who already have coverage comes as a warning shot at a crucial point in the debate and threatens President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.
It’s apparently a journalistic fact that insurance companies used to play nice. But that’s not the worst of the abuses in this p.o.s. article.
Democrats and their allies scrambled on Monday to knock down a new industry-funded study forecasting that Senate legislation, over time, will add thousands of dollars to the cost of a typical policy. "Distorted and flawed," said White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass. "Fundamentally dishonest," said AARP's senior policy strategist, John Rother. "A hatchet job," said a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.
Boy, that sure is some scrambling going on there. I can practically hear Linda Douglass struggling to catch her breath. I’m not sure how John Rother managed to both get dressed and make that quote, he was so scrambled.
Contrast those scrambled responses with the cool, calm, and collected insurance industry:
But the health insurance industry's top lobbyist in Washington stood her ground.
Ah, yes. Thank goodness there’s a level head in this debate. Trust the insurers.
I can keep going line by line – and to be fair, the article ends with three paragraphs of reasonably well-articulated counterarguments, for the 0.5% of the population that read the headline and made it that far. However, I don’t want to lose the forest for the trees.
The AP has a responsibility to headline their stories and frame their facts in as objective and fact-supported a manner as humanly possible. (No human being is free from bias, but a news organization comprised of reporters, editors, fact-checkers, and the like should be able to triangulate away any those individual biases and come up with something that is reasonably grounded in the facts of the situation, even in a politically charged environment like the health care debate.) And the AP has simply fallen down on the job.
Everything about this just reeks of bias, and this is coming from an observer, me, who has generally been ambivalent about the form that a health care bill takes (I’m not a public option-or-else guy, but I do think it’s the only reasonable proposal that’s been set forth).
It starts with the headline, suggesting that the Democrats’ position on this is so fragile, that a simple contradictory statement from an opponent will scatter them to the far corners of Capitol Hill. Absolutely nothing in that article would contravene a headline that read:
"Democrats resolute in the face of insurance industry study"
But apparently that doesn’t convey a message to the AP editors’ liking, so instead we get the image of ineffectual Democrats trying to find something, anything to stand on in the wake of such a powerful blast of logic from AHIP.
It continues into the very first sentence.
Note in that first sentence how the report is characterized, objectively and not through the words a subject in the story, as a "dire message" and a "warning." I guess we’ll have to wait for the AP’s full expose on the "dire warnings" issued by health insurers 10 years ago, warning of the oncoming 111% increase in premiums. Note also how that sentence is constructed so as to logically entail that insurance companies, up until now, have been "playing nice" on the issue of HCR, and that the Democrats must have done something awful to rile them up so much. That’s a sentiment supported by this quote later in the story:
"We've got ourselves a real health care shooting war now," said Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive turned consultant. "The industry has come to the conclusion that the way things are going in Congress, we'll have a ... formula that will be disastrous for their business, so they can't stand on the sidelines any longer."
At this point, a real journalist would have asked in what sense the insurance companies were "on the sidelines" before – were those millions upon millions in campaign contributions and fly-fishing trips with Max Baucus their way of staying aloof and disconnected?
This story is rife with false equivalency at best, and flat-out bias at worst.
So sorry to hear that newspapers are dropping your fine attempts at journalism left and right, AP. But Fox News ratings are booming, so I’m sure you guys can always catch on as staff writers there.