Good Advice

Jamison Foser has some advice for news organizations about how to cover health care reform: Cover health care reform.

Stop wasting time on meaningless polls. Stop focusing on angry townhall outbursts. Stop making it a political issue. Stop giving time to the peddlers of misinformation. And start covering health care reform.

All those polls showing that people hold contradictory views and false -- or at least highly questionable -- beliefs about health care and efforts to reform it are a pretty good indication of what reporters should be doing: Reporting the truth, and doing it often. Giving people the facts about health care and about proposals to reform it.

When you see people yelling, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," that's a pretty good indication that the public could use some solid facts. How many people do you think know that health care reform with a strong public option would cost taxpayers less than a plan without such an option? I would bet that a distressingly large number of members of Congress don't know that -- and that very, very few voters do.

...If news organizations want to produce health care reporting that actually has some value, some utility to their readers and viewers, they'll forget about the polls and the protests and the politics and focus on making the actual facts about health care, and efforts to change the system, as clear as they can.

I know what many journalists will say: This is how things are. Political intrigue, controversy, polling, strategy, demonstrations -- these are the things the media cover. That's how it works.

No. That's how it doesn't work. That's how we have a public that is so badly confused about health care reform that polling on the topic is basically a useless bundle of contradictory results. That's how we have a situation in which more than half of the Republican Party doesn't know Barack Obama was born in the United States.

Go read the whole thing. It's great.