Yes, Say the Word

by Stephen Fleischman

Single Payer National Health Insurance.  Horrors! We can’t have that! That’s Socialism!

Yes, say the word, Socialism!

We can say it and we can have it—at least a little bit of it; even in a capitalist country. A little government for the people—not the corporations—might be a good thing.

Insurance is defined as a promise of compensation for future losses in exchange for a periodic payment. We’ve been sold every kind there is—life insurance, fire insurance, auto insurance, health insurance…

Health doesn’t belong in that group. You can’t put a price on a person’s health. Health care is a right, like education, and not a privilege.

Insurance Companies are in business for profit. Health insurance companies are in business to make a profit on your health. There should be a law against that!

The health insurance companies, in this country, have made so many billions of dollars on peoples’ health, have created so powerful a lobby, bought up so many legislators, it’s going to be a mammoth job to get rid of them, but that’s what we have to do. Health insurance companies are useless and unnecessary. They’re just blood suckers.

Meanwhile their minions, and that includes President Barack Obama, are trying to put on a show. There’s a lot of palaver about health care “reform”.  “Cut health care costs” is the mantra. Have the American people fallen to the level where they will believe that drivel?

It’s a red herring. Billions can be saved by getting rid of the health insurance companies. It can be done with the stroke of a pen. But that’s the chippie. The purpose of the desperate obfuscation is to save the health insurance industry’s sacred profits.

Going in the wrong direction, Obama is gunning for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid? Why pick on the old and the poor, for God’s sake!

To use an aphorism of your professed role model, Abraham Lincoln, you’re trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Why do the minions of the health insurance companies cringe when they hear the term “single payer”? Because they know it means real universal health care, the kind civilized, industrial nations, around the world, offer to their citizens.

The health insurance companies (we’ll call them bloodsuckers) won’t allow the term “single payer” or the term “public option” to be used in the so-called debate that’s going on now in the halls of Congress.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, one of the committees whose job it is to craft some legislation performing the miracle of “health care reform”. Recently, in the course of one of these debates, he threw some advocates of the single payer system out of his office. And furthermore, they were arrested! And they happened to be some prominent people in the health care field.

Psychiatrist Carol Paris, one of “the Baucus 13” who got arrested, told The Billings (Montana) Gazette, “The next 60 days are critical; we need to keep the heat on Sen. Baucus (and Congress and the president).”

In an interview with The Gazette, Paris said she used to believe that the private health insurance market could be reformed to improve health care, and she spent several years lobbying for it.

“After a few years, I came to the conclusion that it was just a phenomenal waste of time,” she said. “At that point, I just said, there has to be a better place for me to put my time and energy.”

Paris is now a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 16,000 members are pushing for a national, publicly funded insurance plan that would replace private health insurance.

When she joined PNHP, to push for a single-payer system, Paris and other members found themselves basically ignored by Congress. They felt they had to do something dramatic to gain attention.

The Billing Gazette reports that they deliberately planned to protest – and get arrested – at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health reform, chaired by Baucus.

Paris and her colleagues showed up the morning of May 5, spread themselves around in the gallery audience and, one by one, interrupted Baucus as he started the meeting.

“I interrupt this so-called public hearing to bring you the following unpaid political announcement: Put single-payer on the table,” Paris said before she was arrested. “My name is Dr. Carol Paris, and I approved this message.”

Capitol police arrested the protesters, who have been charged with disrupting Congress.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” reports that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress. “In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political-action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies.

Dr. Paris said her experience in private practice has convinced her that true reform can happen only if private health insurance is replaced with national, public insurance for all.

“No longer would physicians’ staff have to spend hours dealing with multiple insurers on billing, and no longer would patients have to worry about which doctor they can go to,” she said. “You can go to any doctor of their choice. It’s in the private insurance industry where choice is restricted.”

Dr. Paris says she hears “over and over and over again” how people are frustrated by the current system, and that as soon as they understand how single-payer would work, they usually support it.

“I think that the only thing that keeps this from happening is the lack of political will by the president and our Congress,”

So, yes, say the word.

A little bit of Socialism, anyone?

Where Were You When Journalism Died?

by Stephen Fleischman

The death of Walter Cronkite is an appropriate time to reflect on what’s happened to journalism in America.

Walter and I came to CBS around the same time, in the early 1950s. Sig Mickelson, head of the CBS News and Public Affairs division, at the time, brought Walter in to anchor the first television coverage of a presidential election convention in 1952 and incidentally coined the term “anchorman”.

Irving Gitlin, who ran the Public Affairs section, under Mickelson, brought me in to produce documentaries. In most cases, network correspondents came out of print journalism, television news producers out of film docu-mentaries. Fred Friendly, who started the controversial program “See It Now” in 1951, came out of radio and always thought of television as radio with pictures, and admitted it.

Cronkite embodied the spirit of television journalism. In the 1960s and 70s, there was still some leeway for experimentation. I produced a number of news documentaries with Walter as host and narrator during that period.

In those days, the networks were still mostly independently owned—they had not yet been conglomerated.

William S. Paley, a cigar-maker in Philadelphia created the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network he bought in order to advertise his cigars.

By 1981, when Walter Cronkite handed over the CBS anchor desk to Dan Rather, the process of mergers and acquisitions was well under way.

Television networks were created in order to provide programming to affili-ate local stations. The cost of producing the entertainment or news programs was financed through advertising; so commercial operations got into the game from the very beginning. Profits were shared between the network and their affiliated stations.

In the beginning, each network was limited to owning and operating only five local stations, (called the o&os), usually in the major markets, but they serviced many affiliates.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent US gov-ernment agency, established by the Communications Act of 1934, was charged with regulating interstate and international communications by ra-dio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC makes and is supposed to enforce the rules.

Rule #1—the Fairness Doctrine. In news and public affairs programming, stations must present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is “honest, equitable and balanced” in the Commission’s view or they could be subject to losing their broadcast license.

I haven’t heard of a case where a station lost its license for this reason, but I guess there must be one. However, in 1987, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Oh, well, I guess it didn’t matter.

With the coming of color and the cable news networks, television became even more marinated in commercialism than it was when there were only three commercial networks.

As early as 1961, Newton Minnow, then-head of the FCC made his famous “vaste wasteland” speech before the National Association of Broadcasters convention. Minnow gave the broadcasters unshirted hell for not doing more to serve the public interest.

But that message went in one ear and out the other.

As time went on, the FCC kept loosening the reins, allowing the networks more and more latitude, not only in accumulating more and more o&os, but in deregulating mergers and acquisitions as well.

Today, the mainstream media is in a sorry state. Six corporate media giants with a stranglehold on information, control most of what we see, hear, and read. The five largest are AOL Time-Warner; the Walt Disney Company that now owns the ABC Television Network; Bertelsmann, a German firm with more than $15 billion in media assets; Sumner Redstone’s Viacom that owns CBS; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that controls and runs Fox News on TV and the New York Post on paper and all the news they fix to print.

In addition, they all have interests in major movie studios, other TV chan-nels and networks, cable companies, most of the music companies, book publishing, retail stores, amusement parks, video games, and merchandising and on and on.

Such a concentration of media power in so few hands violates every known theory of a free market place of ideas that is the essence of democracy.

“While television is supposed to be free,” said Walter Lippmann, prominent journalist, in 1959, “it has, in fact, become the creature, the servant and in-deed the prostitute of merchandising.”

Despite his distain for commercial television, Lippmann also exhibited his distain for the intelligence of the American public. He didn’t think they were smart enough to understand complex political issues. The public needed journalists to filter the news for them; elites to interpret what policy-makers and politicians were doing, something called “manufacturing consent” as de-fined by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book by that name, subtitled “The Political Economy of the Mass Media”.

In their view, the media serves and propagandizes for “powerful societal in-terests” that controls and finances them. These interests have important agendas that they want to advance and they have the means with which to do it. It is not accomplished by crude intervention but by the “selection of right-thinking personnel, by editors and working journalists who internalize the priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”

Reporters working in the field call it “Do-It-Yourself Censorship”. You have to know just how far you can push the envelope or you won’t be working in the field very long.

The big change in television came when news became a profit center. With the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and the laxity of the FCC, the News Departments at the Networks no longer felt they had to perform a public service. “Earn your own way, Buddy. Get a sponsor. Show a profit.” News shows started running commercials.

This was the new media world Walter Cronkite saw coming. He didn’t like it, either.

Good-bye, Walter.

Good night and good luck, as Ed Murrow would say.

And that’s the way it is.