This will come as a shock to you, I know, but there's now pretty much incontrovertible evidence that FOX News is little more than a propaganda unit of the GOP, a leaked e-mail in which Fox News's Washington managing editor Bill Sammon issued a memo directing his news staff not to use the phrase "public option."
Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts....
Sources familiar with the situation in Fox's Washington bureau have told Media Matters that Sammon uses his position as managing editor to "slant" Fox's supposedly neutral news coverage to the right. Sammon's "government option" email is the clearest evidence yet that Sammon is aggressively pushing Fox's reporting to the right -- in this case by issuing written orders to his staff.
As far back as March 2009, Fox personalities had sporadically referred to the "government option."
Two months prior to Sammon's 2009 memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz appeared on Sean Hannity's August 18 Fox News program. Luntz scolded Hannity for referring to the "public option" and encouraged Hannity to use "government option" instead.
Luntz argued that "if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split," but that "if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it." Luntz explained that the program would be "sponsored by the government" and falsely claimed that it would also be "paid for by the government."
Form the leaked e-mail, with the subject line "friendlly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the 'public option'":
- Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.
- When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."
- Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."
- When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.
Yep. Fair and balanced.
Health Care for American Now (HCAN), one of the primary activist organizations working on health care reform, responded with this statement from Ethan Rome, executive director:
“At a time when right-wing extremists were trying to make the case that the health care reform bill was a government takeover plot, Fox News incorporated politically charged language into its day-to-day reporting to mislead its audience into thinking the public option was something that it wasn’t. The public option would have competed with private insurance companies to help lower costs and give consumers more choices.
“The commonly used term was ‘public option’ for a reason – it was precise and descriptive of a policy that would have given consumers another choice of coverage.
“But Fox News’s policy is to drive a political agenda and systematically influence its audience’s views. Fox News wanted to smear health care reform by choosing a poll-tested phrase crafted by a Republican communications consultant so its allegedly objective news reporters could describe health care reform as something that it is not.”
One lesson out of this is for the message makers on the Dems side: how much harder would it have been for Fox to sabotage "Medicare for All"?