By James Fallows
The Atlantic, April 4, 2012
Yesterday Barack Obama went to the annual Associated Press luncheon and exhorted journalists to avoid the “false equivalence” syndrome in coverage of controversial events. If you’ve missed the previous 10 million items on this theme, you can read his speech or my precis of it. In short, the false equivalence problem is that although it’s convenient and “objective”-seeming for reporters simply to quote “both sides” of a public issue, the results can be misleading when one of the sides is simply making things up.
Today the same Associated Press published an article on his speech that perfectly exemplified the problem Obama was complaining about, and was all the more piquant for being presented as a “fact check.” The subject was the now-infamous “individual mandate” provision of the administration’s health-care plan.
As Obama pointed out in his speech, the individual mandate originated as a conservative/Republican idea. Conservatives preferred it precisely because it was an alternative to government-run “single-payer” coverage, like Medicare or the VA. This was part of the reason Mitt Romney embraced the mandate in his health-care plan in Massachusetts. Yesterday Obama said:
“So as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions I’m taking now, … if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party.”
Today the AP was back with its “fact check”:
“[I]f Republicans have moved to the right on health care, it’s also true that Obama has moved to the left. He strenuously opposed a mandate forcing people to obtain health insurance until he won office and changed his mind.”
This is false equivalence in its Platonic-ideal form. It’s presented as being “objective” — These politicians! They all just flip and flop! — but in fact is deeply misleading about the realities. As Brian Beutler pointed out today on TPM, making things seem symmetrically unprincipled in this case requires either lack of awareness of, or knowing manipulation of, the basic facts.
Yes, Obama’s position on health care has changed. But his embrace of the “individual mandate” represents a move TO THE RIGHT, not leftward as the story claims. Before that, he had been in favor of (a) single-payer coverage, in his days as an Illinois politician, and (b) the “public option” during his 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. His decision to build “ObamaCare” around the individual mandate — rather than on the public option or a single-payer concept — reflected pressure on the administration to make the plan more “centrist,” not more leftist or radical. When the switch to individual mandate was announced, by far the most heated criticism came from the left, on grounds that Obama had sold out supporters of the public option. Meanwhile, the likes of the impeccably conservative Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa were saying that there was a “bipartisan consensus” in favor of the individual mandate compromise. So: the current Republican hostility to the individual mandate represents a rightward shift, and so too does Obama’s embrace of the plan.
Beutler sums up the achievement of this latest “fact check”:
“His hosts [at AP] weren’t listening — and as a result they’ve made Obama’s points about Republicans and the media for him….
“It’s true that Obama campaigned against an individual mandate in 2008, only to embrace it — however reluctantly — after he became president. But to say that constitutes a move to the left betrays a lack of understanding about the origins and purpose of the individual mandate, and of Obama’s broader evolution on health care reform.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/false-equivalence-watch-the-platonic-ideal-form/255468/
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Within the mainstream media there is hardly an article on politics that doesn’t make some effort to present “both sides” of the issue, often settling on reporting suggesting that “centrist” views best represent an application of the facts. Where does single payer fit in this?
For the past few years, single payer was largely considered irrelevant and not included in most discussions. Earlier, the “public option” – a public insurance program to be offered as an option in the insurance exchanges – was considered to represent the position of the left.
Some of us dedicated single payer supporters were loudly protesting that the public option was merely a decoy to create the impression that the legislation was centrist, rather than actually being merely a perpetuation of the highly dysfunctional financing system that we have. The mainstream media again dismissed us as irrelevant and covered “both sides” as if this dispute were over support for the public option representing the views of the left, and opposition to the option representing the views of the right.
In truth, most in the progressive community had latched onto the public option, and so the media was not totally off track. A very large sector the progressive community had moved far to the right by supporting the public option, thereby implicitly supporting the model being created in Congress – the Heritage/Republican mandate proposal requiring individuals to purchase private insurance plans.
And where are we now? Most progressives have set aside their demands for the public option and are asking the Supreme Court to support the right-wing individual mandate! Thus the media is presenting “both sides” as the left supporting the mandate and the right opposed – a dispute taking place in far-right territory.
Not all progressives have followed the lemmings. A group of fifty noble physicians and a couple of single payer organizations have submitted an amicus in opposition to the individual mandate. The rationale is that we should get rid of this horrendous legislation and clear the way for the only other alternative – a single payer national health program. The amicus was a tactical decision on which passionate single payer supporters could differ.
The leadership of Physicians for a National Health Program – a single payer advocacy organization strongly opposed to the financing model of the Affordable Care Act – elected not to take a position either for or against the Supreme Court challenge since it was a distracting diversion from PNHP’s mission. Instead, we made the tactical decision that we would be more effective continuing with our unrelenting advocacy for single payer while condemning the cruel and inhumane financing system perpetuated in the Affordable Care Act.
In the heat of the Supreme Court debate we are seeing the issue of single payer creeping back into the national dialogue. In an effort to present both sides, many reporters, in covering the debate over the mandate, have included the view of those who believe that rejecting the mandate will result in turning to the only other option – single payer.
And, by the way, “both sides” does not mean the right and the left. There are many on the right who support the single payer concept, and some on the left oppose it.
Let’s do all we can to dump the false-equivalence debate over the public option and the individual mandate and move on to covering what are truly “both sides” – an efficient, equitable and affordable single payer system versus the wasteful, costly, inequitable, and fragmented financing system of the Affordable Care Act which would leave far too many of us sick and broke.