Keeping The Holy Grail Safely Out Of Sight

Observers of the recent PA primary coverage might also have caught the public affairs show NOW that week, which featured our state's health care debate. When we learned NOW was to air such a segment just prior to the primary, many of us were elated. NOW has a reputation for excellent reporting, and some among us predicted valuable exposure for a grassroots single payer movement that is changing the health care debate. Surely, we thought, host David Brancaccio would at least touch on alternatives to the governor's for-profit reform approach. When NOW staff contacted us for information, we were justifiably pumped at the possibilities.

Instead, what aired on the week of April 18th was a disheartening exercise in received wisdom and watered-down moderation the likes of which passes for news on commercial networks. Like the major media campaign coverage, which centered on one candidate's lapel pin and a Chicago preacher, NOW chose to focus on the least significant health care reforms. Both types of coverage were essentially nonsense.

The NOW episode, perversely titled "Health Care Meltdown: Looking for Solutions," did nothing of the sort. It proposed a "bold debate" that ranged from Governor Rendell to Republican Representative Karen Beyer, which in policy terms is like saying they covered the alphabet from A to C.  Both offered identically tiny adjustments to the profit-driven and lethal status quo.  When NOW encountered perspectives outside their narrow frame of reference, they made them go away. One such moment came when by spectacular luck one of our board members, Kevin Hauck, was interviewed by NOW at a coffee house in Philadelphia. None of Kevin's comments on single payer made it into the final program. No reference to our efforts or those of countless citizens all across the Commonwealth to change how we think about healthcare got past David Brancaccio's editor.  The segment's only reference to single payer healthcare was in passing and dismissed immediately as a mythical "holy grail."   Trudy Lieberman has written an excellent dissection of the NOW segment in the Columbia Journalism Review. Read it and learn more, then share your views with the staff at NOW.

In wondering why an otherwise fine public television program so thoroughly dodged its responsibility to inform its viewers, it's worth remembering the attacks NOW suffered earlier this decade. The program's original host, Bill Moyers, earned the ire of conservatives by presenting well-crafted and informed segments on public policy issues that often invited conclusions at odds with right-wing dogma. In 2003, after President Bush appointed an arch-conservative to the chairmanship of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the braying for "balance" on the public airwaves got louder. The new CPB chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, lost little time in attacking NOW. The most public attack came in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, in which Tomlinson accused NOW of "left-wing bias" and called its image "unhealthy." Moyers' departure from public broadcasting a year later was attributed by many to the controversy over NOW.

Fast forward three years.  Bill Moyers is back with another excellent public television series, Kenneth Tomlinson has left the CPB amidst accusations of financial malfeasance, and it seems NOW remains frozen in a defensive crouch. By seeking to avoid controversy as it did in its PA health care episode, the staff of NOW would appear to have learned the wrong lesson about the ways of Washington. They should instead remember that integrity counts for something, regardless of which political flavor is popular at the moment.  Integrity lasts. Had NOW kept this in mind, its viewers might well have learned something important about health care reform in Pennsylvania. Instead, all they got was a look at Governor Rendell's lapel pin.

NOW transcript: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/416/transcript.html
Trudy Lieberman's piece: http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/missing_singlepayer_in_pennsyl.php
NOW feedback form: http://www.pbs.org/now/feedback.html