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Both the politics and the substance of the proposed healthcare reform legislation are finally getting some traction. Give credit to those raucous town hall meetings. Now the dry abstractions of insurance reform, mandates and subsidies, and federal intervention have animated visuals to add some zest. After Tuesday's sedate presentation by President Barack Obama both NBC and CBS led with shouting crowds grilling hometown politicians. Healthcare was Story of the Day again. Only ABC failed to sign on, choosing to kick off with statistics about federal deficit spending.
NBC's Savannah Guthrie found herself in the delicious position of reporting on the White House's criticism of the news media's fixation on the most confrontational of the town hall meetings by showing scenes from another round of town hall meetings. These ran the gamut "from the cordial to the combative." She quoted press secretary Robert Gibbs deploring the "food fight on cable every day" even as Democrats such as Sen Claire McCaskill of Missouri "toned down criticism of protestors as extremists on the fringe." On NBC's Today, McCaskill praised the hecklers who interrupted her as "democracy in action." CBS' Cynthia Bowers followed Charles Grassley, McCaskill's Republican colleague from Iowa, to a series of four town hall meetings and found "standing-room only crowds at every stop."
The false dichotomy between orchestrated protests and authentic opposition reapperaed in Ben Tracy's report on CBS. Obviously it is possible, even desirable, for political activists to be both sincere and coordinated but Tracy tried to generate controversy by distorting it as an either-or. He quoted Michael Patrick Leahy of the National Tea Party Coalition in support of the protestors--"It is a million-or-so independent individual voices, exercising their right to free speech"--and jumped on that "independent" to find Leahy contending that "the outrage is not organized." So Tracy cited coordinating groups such as Recess Rally and Right Principles and Freedom Works to undercut Leahy. Tracy concluded with a supporter of healthcare reform pointing the finger at FOX News Channel's orchestrators Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity for delivering talking points "that are not true."
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