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Journal-isms March 22

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Debate Begins on Media’s Coverage of Health Care Saga

. . . Cable News Networks Made Differences Clear

 Tiger Woods Unrevealing in Media Comeback

Immigration Marchers Had Stiff Competition

40 Years Later, Newsweek Women Measure Progress

Short Takes

President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and senior staff members react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House as the House passes the health care reform bill Sunday night. (Credit: Pete Souza/White House)

Debate Begins on Media’s Coverage of Health Care Saga

"It was the story that refused to die," Howard Kurtz wrote Monday in the Washington Post.

"Sunday’s last-gasp passage of President Obama’s health care bill will finally liberate the journalists who have been chained to this complicated, arcane, often tedious story for 14 long months.

"It’s not that media types were rooting for the House to drag the measure across the finish line. It’s that many were frustrated by a tangled tale that never seemed to end, and knew that plenty of readers and viewers were sick of the subject as well.

"The conventional wisdom is that the press failed to educate the public about the bill’s sweeping changes, leaving much of America confused about just what it contained. That is largely a bum rap, for the media churned out endless reams of data and analysis that were available to anyone who bothered to look.

"As time went on, though, journalists became consumed by political process and Beltway politics, to the point that the substance of health care reform was overwhelmed. Here the plea is guilty-with-an-explanation: The battle came down to whether the Senate could adopt changes by majority vote (reconciliation) and, until late Saturday, whether the House could approve the Senate measure without a recorded vote (deem and pass). With the bill’s fate hanging by these procedural threads, there was no way to avoid making that the overriding story. (And yes, the Senate reconciliation vote is still to come.)

"History is written by the winners, and sometimes by the leakers. Thus, the New York Times¬†and Politico began lengthy Sunday tick-tocks on the battle with Nancy Pelosi privately confronting Obama and Rahm Emanuel over a scaled-down version of the bill that, according to both accounts, she dismissed as ‘kiddie care.’ The odds that her staff provided such colorful details are high.

"Trudy Lieberman, a longtime specialist in health reporting, offers a harsh verdict in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review. She says the press coverage ‘has been largely incoherent to the man on the street . . . failed to illuminate the crucial issues, [and] quoted special interest groups and politicians without giving consumers enough information to judge if their claims were fact or fiction.’ "

. . . Cable News Networks Made Differences Clear

"As the fight to pass health care legislation progressed on Sunday, the tenor of the struggle changed depending on what channel you watched," Eric Deggans wrote Monday on his St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times blog.

"On right-leaning Fox News Channel, the cries of tea party protesters resisting the legislation were never far from the stage, as anchors and reporters referred continuously to those parked outside the Capitol building as the day wound on.

"On liberal-friendly MSNBC, pundit panels were stocked with on air personalities known for supporting the legislation and/or Democratic politics, including Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell.

"CNN went hip-deep in its own anchor bench, bringing in Wolf Blitzer, Candy Crowley, John King, Gloria Borger and Sanjay Gupta, with punctuation from partisan commentators. And there was always C-SPAN as an option, if you preferred to watch the debate on the House floor unfiltered.

"It added up to a bizarre display of reporting, in which you could flick between different political perspectives like an eye doctor clicking through different lens prescriptions."

Tiger Woods gave five-minute interviews Sunday to ESPN and The Golf Channel. CBS passed. (Video)

Tiger Woods Unrevealing in Media Comeback

"Phase two of the ‘Tiger Woods Comeback’ was rolled out on Sunday evening¬†with a pair of five-minute interviews with Woods on ESPN and The Golf Channel," Marcus Vanderberg wrote Monday for theGrio.com.

"Tom Rinaldi and Kelly Tilghman (yes, the one who said Tiger should be lynched in a back alley in 2008) had free range with Woods, who allowed no restrictions on the questions.

"So with no restrictions on the questions, you would expect to finally hear all the juicy details on what really happened on the night of Nov. 27 or his thoughts on the series of text messages that were released last week by alleged mistress Joslyn James, right? Not so much.

"Woods deflected anything dealing with the accident or his relationship with his wife, Elin.

"’Well, it’s all in the police report,’ Woods told Rinaldi. ‘Beyond that everything’s between [wife] Elin and myself and that’s private. I was living a life of a lie, I really was. And I was doing a lot of things…that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly. But then again, when you face it and you start conquering it and you start living up to it, the strength that I feel now…I’ve never felt that type of strength.’

"The follow-up questions from both networks, especially Tilghman and The Golf network, were a shank job (for lack of a better golf term) to say the least," a reference to what is considered the worst shot in golf.

In the New York Times on Monday, Bill Carter explained that,"CBS declined an opportunity to be the third outlet speaking with the golf star Sunday, primarily because executives at the network did not believe the interview would hold much value  — not after he had already given his five minutes’ worth to ESPN and the Golf Channel.

"Though they declined to speak on the record, CBS executives described their reluctance Monday less as a journalistic stand against an interview subject trying to control questioning than as a practical decision about what benefit the network could get from the interview."

Immigration Marchers Had Stiff Competition

"The pictures prove it. Over 200,000 (unsubstantiated estimates go as high as 500,000) immigration reform marchers, dressed in white t-shirts and toting either American flags or signs marched and mingled at the National Mall in Washington, DC yesterday, while at the same time the House of Representatives busily debated the healthcare reform bill on Capitol Hill," Marisa Trevino wrote Monday on her Latina Lista blog.

"The hope of the march was to remind the President that the Latino community had not forgotten his campaign promises to reform immigration policy. Plus, it was to show Congress that even a small fraction of the Latino community can make a lot of noise.

"Yet, with all (media) eyes focused on the congressional theatrics leading up to passage of the healthcare bill and undue attention given to a small group of Tea Party protesters on Capitol Hill, after some in their group unleashed their special warped brand of patriotism against some gay and Democratic politicians of color, the 200,000-500,000 immigration reform marchers were hardly seen or heard of in the mainstream media

40 Years Later, Newsweek Women Measure Progress

"In 1970, 46 women filed a landmark gender-discrimination case. Their employer was NEWSWEEK. Forty years later, their contemporary counterparts question how much has actually changed," the newsmagazine blurbs for the March 29 edition, posted on the Web on Friday.

Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison and Sarah Ball wrote, "Until six months ago, when sex- and gender-discrimination scandals hit ESPN, David Letterman‚Äôs Late Show, and the New York Post, the three of us‚Äîall young NEWSWEEK writers‚Äîknew virtually nothing of these women’s struggle. Over time, it seemed, their story had faded from the collective conversation. . .

"Yet the more we talked to our friends and colleagues, the more we heard the same stories of disillusionment, regardless of profession. No one would dare say today that ‘women don’t write here,’ as the NEWSWEEK women were told 40 years ago. But men wrote all but six of NEWSWEEK’s 49 cover stories last year ‚Äî and two of those used the headline ‘The Thinking Man.’ In 1970, 25 percent of NEWSWEEK’s editorial masthead was female; today that number is 39 percent. Better? Yes. But it’s hardly equality. (Overall, 49 percent of the entire company, the business and editorial sides, is female.) ‘Contemporary young women enter the workplace full of enthusiasm, only to see their hopes dashed,’ says historian Barbara J. Berg. ‘Because for the first time they’re slammed up against gender bias.’ "

Short Takes

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