The reverse Pulitzers for unmeritorious public service go to ... the L.A. Times and the Sac Bee
31 01 08 - 11:28
I have always been reluctant to buy theories that posit some newspapers' coverage is driven by open, blatant biases. Everytime someone calls The New York Times or The Washington Post hopelessly liberal, I bring up the inconvenient fact that they were the ones who pursued the Whitewater scandal the hardest, which midwifed the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which almost brought down the only popular Democratic president of the past 40 years.
But the L.A. Times' and the Sacramento Bee's coverage of Arnold's health insurance "reform" efforts of the past 14 months shakes my assumption in newspapers' good faith. I exempt Sac Bee columnist Dan Walters. Otherwise, from the first day, virtually everything written by the state's most influential newspapers built off the fundamental assumption that Arnold's plan must be approved, it just must be, it's a godsend, it's Incredibly Important. As for actually examining the plan to see if it lives up to its hype? Nah. No need.
If you think that's an exaggeration, consider the following things the Times and the Bee never reported on or all but ignored:
1. The Agsalud decision. On Oct. 5, 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed without comment a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Hawaii could not force employers to fund health insurance benefits. So what Arnold was seeking was plainly illegal.
Instead of noting this 100 percent relevant legal history, most of the Bee's coverage and all of the Times' acted as if there was some uncertainty about the implications of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 for California's health reform debate. How could they ignore the Agsalud decision? How? How? How?
Walters was the only one Bee or LAT journo to even mention it.
2. The Suffolk County decision. Last summer, a federal judge threw out Suffolk County, N.Y.'s employer mandate on the grounds it was a plain and clear ERISA violation. How could this be deemed so unimportant it should be ignored?
3. The fact that that both Fabian Nunez and Andrea Lynn Hoch, the governor's legal affairs secretary, grossly misrepresented a ruling of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals throwing out Maryland's employer mandate, saying it was killed not because of ERISA but because it singled out Wal-Mart. In fact, the opinion specifically rejected the singling-out-a-single-company argument. Isn't their dishonesty relevant?
The journalistic malfeasance gets worse. Consider the elements of Arnold's health plan the Times and the Bee never took a hard look at:
1. The huge incentives it created for private businesses to abandon providing their own care. California has a long, ugly history of passing sweeping laws with unintended consequences. If a law was passed that allowed companies that spent 12 percent of their payroll on health insurance to have the state do the job for half that amount, it isn't rocket science to conclude that a lot of private employers would abandon their own coverage.
Where was the Times' two-part series interviewing academics, lawmakers and business owners about the "crowding out" effect created by governments offering subsidized alternatives to private sector services? Where was the Bee's long interview with the MIT economist who concocted Arnold's plan and argued little "crowding out" would occur?
2. The shaky assumption that Congress would go along with a big increase in federal health aid that would only be received by California. In January 2007, health-policy expert Michael Cannon pointed out the improbability of lawmakers from the other 49 states embracing special subsidies for the Golden State. A year later, the LAO made the same point. Where were the LAT and the Sac Bee in the interim?
3. The rocky start suffered by Massachusetts' reform plan, which Arnold's plan was in some ways modeled on. Didn't the fact that its assumptions about low monthly premiums quickly went awry matter? How could they not be relevant to California's debate?
It gets even worse. Consider the falsehoods, distortions and lack of context the Times and the Bee routinely offered in exaggerating the extent of the problem:
1. They routinely declared that 6.7 million Californians are without health insurance. No, that's at any point over a year. The snapshot figure of those uninsured at any given time is 5 million. And shouldn't a distinction be made between Californians -- which to most people means legal state residents -- and illegal immigrants?
2. Forty percent of the 5 million without insurance are in families that earn triple or more the federal poverty level or are individuals who are eligible for free state or federal care but don't sign up. Where was the story taking a hard look at the claims of the family making $65,000 a year that it couldn't afford health insurance but could afford a new car or a flat-screen TV? Where was the story about the gross irresponsibility of the parents of the 750,000 eligible but unenrolled children?
Why was the most specific, accurate description of the problem never used -- to wit, that there are about 3 million California residents who at any given time either can't afford health insurance or aren't eligible for state- or federal-provided coverage?
I could go on and on in this vein. I could point out the thoroughness with which the L.A. Times dissected Hillary Clinton's health reform plan in 1993 and 1994 and compare it with their cheerleading for Arnold's plan this time. I could note the column inches the Sac Bee has devoted to exposing the California Highway Patrol's mismanagement and compare it with their failure to offer a close look at many obvious problems with Arnold's plan, which would have affected more people than the CHP's woes.
But what does it matter? The fix is in. The L.A. Times and the Sac Bee long ago decided that any change was better than the current system and decided that its coverage should reflect this conclusion. Even after last week's LAO report and Senate Health Committee hearing laid bare all the shortcomings of the health plan, both newspapers still ran editorials over the weekend demanding the horribly flawed measure be approved.
The Times made the simply absurd claim that "failing to do so could delay reform for yet another generation." The Bee impugned the motives of the bill's critics. The sheer stinking mendacity of this would be downright funny -- if these papers didn't have such clout.
Too bad no one gives out reverse Pulitzers for unmeritorious public service. The Times and the Bee would win in a romp.
Posted by Chris Reed at January 30, 2008 12:52 PM