Conservative Media

Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, published a glowing profile of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn Monday that incredibly failed to mention the defining element of the Oklahoma senator’s career: obstructionism.

Douthat, we can only speculate, agrees with every one of Coburn’s numerous and legendary holds on legislation, but the writer’s failure to focus on the senator’s political theatrics in his sycophantic article makes his commentary seem disingenuous.

The truth of the matter is that Coburn, who represents a state with 3.6 million people, has shown how one senator from a relatively small state can have a disproportionate influence on the political process. The rules of the Senate allow one member to place holds on specific legislation, making it difficult for some bills to received consideration. Coburn, known as “Dr. No,” has abused this privilege.

Coburn has become so associated with the hold practice his name is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

According to Wikipedia:

During the 110th Congress, Senator Tom Coburn put holds on a significant number of bills, raising the ire of the leadership and forcing them to package many of the bills with holds into one Omnibus Act (the so-called "Tom-nibus") at the beginning of the 111th Congress. Some Senators have complained that the hold system makes it too easy to block legislation, that the leadership should not honor holds on the floor unless the Senator is personally there to object.

For some reason, Douthat apparently doesn’t see this issue as important. Here’s a 2008 Think Progress post on Coburn’s holds. At one point in 2008, Coburn had holds on 80 bills, some of which dealt with medical research and initiatives. Coburn, of course, is a medical doctor.

Coburn has continued to place holds on bills since his 2008 stunts. He recently tried to block the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. I wrote about that stunt here.

In Oklahoma, Coburn is also well known for his hateful anti-gay positions that smack of ignorance and fear mongering. In a bizarre statement taped during his 2004 senate campaign, for example, Coburn said he was told that lesbianism was “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.” His remark was strongly refuted by at least one school official, and, really, on its own merits it’s preposterous and offensive.

But Douthat finds Coburn “intellectually honest.” Douthat, on some level, represents conservative intellectualism—he writes for The New York Times after all—but there’s nothing intellectual about his glaring omissions in his Coburn profile. The commentary reads more like a deceptive whitewash from a faux conservative playing the current media milieu.

The latest reminder how intellectually bankrupt the conservative movement remains in this country are the tributes written about journalist and once-avowed racist James Kilpatrick, an Oklahoma City native, who died recently.

In its obituary,The New York Times mentioned this about Kilpatrick:

At times, Mr. Kilpatrick went beyond constitutional arguments. In 1963, he drafted an article for The Saturday Evening Post with the proposed title “The Hell He Is Equal,” in which he wrote that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.”

This was a racism he apparently learned in Oklahoma City. According to The Times obituary, Kilpatrick, who was a syndicated newspaper columnist and a conservative opinion contributor to the television show 60 Minutes, later “re-examined” his views on segregation:

“I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930,” he told Time magazine in 1970. “I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.”

In the obituary, Kilpatrick is called “a prominent conservative voice for half a century.” That Kilpatrick was able to remain “prominent” after his ignorant and hateful vitriol must be attributed to a lingering and perhaps foundational racism in the conservative movement along with a mainstream media that sees such overt racism as a type of historical balance to liberalism and diversity, not as something inherently wrong and immoral.

The blog Sans Everything, in a post titled “James J. Kilpatrick: Death of a Bigot,” points out the 2006 book Freedom Is Not Enough by Nancy MacLean depicts Kilpatrick as someone who eventually learned to hide his white supremacist views and carry on with his ultra-conservative agenda.

The post’s writer, listed as Jeet Heer, had these words about Kilpatrick:

I expect to see many mealy-mouthed obituaries about how Kilpatrick was a sweet old man who might have had a few wrong-headed ideas when young but who grew wiser with age. In fact, Kilpatrick never genuinely repented his racism, and until his legacy is described accurately there will be no full reckoning with the past.

The corporate media continues its misinformation campaign against healthcare reform.

Major television networks have given inordinate attention to “perceived setbacks” to healthcare reform legislation while downplaying any progress, according to Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group.

Meanwhile, on a local level, The Oklahoman continues its relentless opposition to healthcare reform in editorial after editorial, often without mentioning there are approximately 46 million people in the nation without health insurance or that the price of healthcare and health insurance premiums have risen astronomically over the last decade.

The Oklahoman resorts to typical hackneyed, clichéd arguments about healthcare from a right-wing perspective. According to a recent editorial, “As it is, the legislation is a big-government liberal’s health care dream come true.” This “liberal’s health care dream” tripe prevents real discussion about the issue.

Here are some facts about healthcare in Oklahoma, which I have reported on before:

Roughly 1.9 million people in Oklahoma get health insurance on the job, where family premiums average $12,256, about the annual earning of a full-time minimum wage job.

Since 2000 alone, average family premiums have increased by 77 percent in Oklahoma.

Household budgets are strained by high costs: 29 percent of middle-income Oklahoma families spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care.

High costs block access to care: 17 percent of people in Oklahoma report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.

Oklahoma businesses and families shoulder a hidden health tax of roughly $1,900 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.

19 percent of people in Oklahoma are uninsured, and 70 percent of them are in families with at least one full-time worker.

The percent of Oklahomans with employer coverage is declining: 54 percent were covered in 2007.

While small businesses make up 78 percent of Oklahoma businesses, only 39 percent of them offered health coverage benefits in 2006.

Choice of health insurance is limited in Oklahoma. BCBS OK alone constitutes 45 percent of the health insurance market share in Oklahoma, with the top two insurance providers accounting for 71 percent.

Choice is even more limited for people with pre-existing conditions. In Oklahoma, premiums can vary based on demographic factors and health status, and coverage can exclude pre-existing conditions or even be denied completely.

The overall quality of care in Oklahoma is rated as “Weak.”

16 percent of children in Oklahoma are obese.

28 percent of women over the age of 50 in Oklahoma have not received a mammogram in the past two years.

45 percent of men over the age of 50 in Oklahoma have never had a colorectal cancer screening.

Why do the editorials against healthcare reform in The Oklahoman never honestly address these issues? Health insurance premiums in Oklahoma have risen 77 percent since 2000, but the newspaper’s editorial writers apparently don’t even see it as a compelling issue in the healthcare reform debate.

The Media Matters study shows, perhaps, an even more insidious and subtle misinformation effort at work.

According to Media Matters:

In their health care reform coverage, media have repeatedly given considerably more attention to perceived setbacks to progressive reform efforts than to events that signal progress for those efforts. A Media Matters for America analysis of transcripts available in the Nexis database has found that broadcast and cable news featured almost twice as many segments mentioning the American Medical Association's (AMA's) reported opposition to a public insurance plan as segments mentioning the AMA's recent announcement that it supported the House Democrats' health care reform bill, which includes a public plan.

When it comes to healthcare reform, the corporate media is acting typically conservative, supporting the interests of big health insurance companies over ordinary people. In the end, this is a bad, long-term business model for major media news outlets, some of which are in financial decline.

The question is how the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama should counteract the corporate media’s bias against healthcare reform as the debate intensifies and Republicans rely on the worn-out language of a dead ideology repudiated nationwide in the 2008 elections.

Should the Democrats directly attack the media for its bias over healthcare reform, risking further unbalanced coverage? How can they present their message more effectively through alternative media sites?

As I’ve written before, the nation needs more national and local media outlets that don’t rely on the corporate rhetorical frames hard wired in the current mainstream press.

(The Walter Cronkite quote in the above image can be found here.)