Anti-health care reform rally, Denver, July 28, 2009. Submitted anonymously
We've been watching the coverage of these protests build for the last few days, and a major disconnect has emerged in our opinion between media coverage of the protesters and the facts. What you see on television is generally upset protesters as background footage, a few audio clips of them yelling but mostly the protesters rolling in the background while talking heads explain "what it all means."
The relatively dispassionate GOP talking points against the health care reform bill cited by Riley are what the talking heads are usually talking about on TV while protester footage runs in the background, cleverly leading the viewer to believe that those talking points are what the protesters are up in arms about. But they're not.
The protesters think Obama wants to kill old people.
There are two different narratives about the health care reform bill being pushed by reform opponents now--one publicly and the other virally though email networks, talk radio, word-of-mouth, etc. The public narrative is the one about tax hikes, deficit spending, and "burdens on business."
The viral message is that Obama wants to kill old people.
A portion of radio host Rush Limbaugh's show yesterday:
CALLER: Oh, great to... (cell drops). I'm so angry. I mean, I've been upset before about this but now I'm just so angry about this commercial. They are just treating us as just mindless people working for insurance company, lobbyists. I mean, we are citizens expressing our rights. Are we just supposed to sit idly by while they try to get our parents to die -- [Pols emphasis]
RUSH: You are supposed to -- no.
CALLER: -- because they know what to do, know what's good for us?
RUSH: You are supposed to get mad, exactly what you're doing.
Look, you know it's crazy. The television news producers who are, consciously or unconsciously, feeding this insanity by--we don't know any other way to say it--concealing the actual opinions being expressed at these protests to create false empathy with them among non-crazy people, they know this rhetoric has no basis in reality. When these furious people scream at Democrats to "keep the government's hands off my Medicare," or "my insurance company doesn't ration me," some part of even the most cynical opponent of the plan has to realize they are manipulating ignorance for political advantage--and it's wrong.
And yet it goes on, totally unchecked in the media. The key failure, in our view, is not telling the full story about what these people are actually saying in the crowds Jeff Crank uses as his backdrop--as much as we respect him, Michael Riley had a chance to do that today, and didn't. |
