Marta Mossburg: Keep government out of media
By: Marta Mossburg
Examiner Columnist
October 27, 2009
If Fox News is not news, according to the White House, then what is CBS' "60 Minutes"? If Sunday's lineup is an example, it's flirting with becoming Obama TV.
It began its program with a piece on Medicare fraud - a worthy topic. But it's all about "perspective," as President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said of Fox's reporting.
Steve Kroft began the segment with, "Of all the problems facing the United States right now, none are more important than health care. President Obama says rising costs are driving huge federal budget deficits that imperil our future and that there is enough waste and fraud in the system to pay for health care reform if it were eliminated."
Who says health care reform is the biggest issue in the country - "60 Minutes," the president or the people of the United States? Polls consistently show the economy outranks health care reform on the list of Americans' concerns. But it certainly is Obama's chief concern as he seeks to overhaul the U.S. health system this fall. Kroft did mention that the $60 billion fraud industry raises "troubling questions" about the government's ability to run a bigger health care bureaucracy and told a chilling tale of how easy it is to defraud taxpayers. But the entire story is framed under the auspices that the government says this is the biggest issue, so therefore it should be covered.
That segment was followed by what can only be called an epilepsy advocacy piece by Katie Couric focused on Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod and his wife, Susan. Their family faced a huge struggle with a disease that struck their daughter Lauren, 28, as an infant. Theirs is a compelling story and the debate over funding for epilepsy certainly is a worthy public policy issue. But with three million people suffering from the disease in the United States, according to Couric, aren't there others who could have served as her protagonists? There was nothing particularly newsy about the piece that made them necessary headliners.
And then there was the timing of the piece. The previous week Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week" that Fox shouldn't be treated as news and "the bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way, and we're not going to treat them that way." To then run an emotional interview with Axelrod stating that "epilepsy is like terrorism of the brain" was equivalent to shouting: "Look how much access we have!"
The problem is "60 Minutes" is not supposed to be about access; it is supposed to be about insight. And in a hat trick for the administration, the next piece on producer Tyler Perry included an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Obama supporter in chief. She did not discuss the administration, but in a segment outlining Perry's connection with his audience, couldn't correspondent Byron Pitts have found a person who is not an unofficial spokeswoman for the White House to comment on his plays and movies?
I don't think the Obama administration's communication department could have designed a better lineup.
That's a great coup for them. But it makes the proposal to federally finance the struggling news industry advanced in a new report all the scarier. Who would decide which news organizations deserved money? Would those not favored by the government like Fox News under the Obama administration be discriminated against?
The report, written by Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, and Leonard Downie Jr., a professor at Arizona State University, said "any use of government money to help support news reporting would require mechanisms, besides the protections of the First Amendment, to insulate the resulting journalism as much as possible from pressure, interference or censorship." What mechanisms would that be - government employees?
That is scary, especially considering that free speech is not always supported at taxpayer-funded National Public Radio. Last week political editor Ken Rudin called the Obama campaign against Fox "Nixonesque." He quickly backtracked and offered an apology, praised by NPR's ombudsman.
Awhile Fox may be the target of the current administration, enhanced government oversight and control of news could burn liberal news organizations, particularly MSNBC, if a Republican president takes office. And if a venerable news magazine like "60 Minutes" can fall prey to the administration's agenda, who can doubt federal financial control of the media will not strengthen the government's ability to deliver its message?
Examiner Columnist Marta Mossburg is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and lives in Baltimore.
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