Last night I saw a sobering statistic, reporting audience numbers for Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. It was instructive. Put in overly simplified terms, if 5 people are watching cable news, three of them are watching Fox News, one is watching MSNBC, and one is watching CNN. It seems to me that there is some embedded information here. Three people are being scared to death, while only two might be getting a somewhat more nuanced picture of the nation’s response to health care reform.

I have to admit that I was heartened to see MSNBC edge ahead of CNN. Rachel Maddow is doing the closest thing to investigative reporting I can find on cable, though I think her colleagues at MSNBC, with a few exceptions, are not noticing this, even though her rankings keep swelling. She is also the “young” and “very intelligent” player in this drama. She consistently references the successes of her colleagues, though they rarely return the favor. She understands the role of the internet as no other commentator. There is probably some embedded information in all these facts too.

One of the most bizarre aspects of watching our collective response to the potential of a real change in health care is the fixation by cable news on the political gamesmanship of the process, likening these games to games of the past in a rather nostalgic tone of voice. There is thus an overt neglect of the issues. Hence, I have an excess of information about who thinks who is doing stuff behind the scenes (reference Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton here) and almost no factual information on the realities of the health care world. The rare exceptions are noteworthy because they are rare.

I of course have a stake in changes I hope for in the health care system. I am a registered nurse, proudly so. For the last several years I have been traveling throughout the United States providing a service designed to help health care providers deal more constructively with the conflicts in their organizations. It provides me with a sense of what is happening in our hospitals, schools, and professional organizations as they grapple with our current health care realities. Needless to say, it has exacerbated the conflict.

The stories I would prefer viewing, the ones that might inform our citizenry, are legion.

• The overcrowded urban emergency rooms, chock full of human suffering at 2AM, sick kids, confused elderly persons, victims of violence, drugged up young people…standing room only.
• The appearance in bankruptcy court of families loosing their homes due to failure to pay the exorbitant costs for catastrophic health crises and care
• The families who watch their lives implode due to the sudden appearance of cancer, diabetes, a serious car accident, a rare disease
• The wage earner, suddenly ill, who discovers that the insurance that was trusted is actually pretty worthless when the illness shows up
• The head of the family who is suddenly unemployed, trying to scare up COBRA money when there is too little money for food and housing
• The health care providers wasting precious care provision time trying to figure out how to game the system of the monopolistic commercial insurers that have an overriding goal of NOT financing health care services.
• The opportunistic for profit health care companies making that profit on the backs of sick people by the commoditization of health care services and the refusal to care for the uninsured
• The undaunted spirit of the not-for-profit health care companies absorbing the care demands of all the people the commercial insurers won’t cover
• The drug companies clinging to their patents to make quick money. charging irrational sums of money for necessary medications, particularly the life saving drugs so new that they have no competitors,
• The frustrated physicians who are NOT getting rich even though a few of their colleagues are, while they slog through the day to day challenge of helping sick people who have no coverage or no hope.
• The harried nurses who know that the number of people covering their shift are inadequate to the needs of their patients, yet desperately try to do their best
• The careful care for the wealthy, that careless care for the poor
• The extensive data that shows how much our health care dollar is actually going to administrative costs, particularly administrative costs that are actually the lobbying and advertising costs for commercial insurers, drug companies and for profit provider organizations
• The health care administrators who are in good faith trying to lead hundreds of employees and thousands of patients through this ridiculous maze and still “do no harm”
• The characteristics, costs, and services of successful government run health care programs
• The detailed documentation of unnecessary costs, defensive medicine and what it looks like, the pattern of care that leads to providing what is reimbursable, not what is best
• The explanation of the executives of commercial insurers for their ad campaigns, their lobbying costs and their profit margins
• The users and providers in other countries with the single payer systems that actually work for their citizens who have better health outcomes than we do
• The stories of the people who are dying daily in the US because they cannot afford health care, elect not to get health care to save their families the financial collapse it involves, the families left behind in confusion and depressive rage.

This list looks long, yet is not exhaustive. Any one of these stories would better inform the public than endless loops of the uncivil screaming town hall meeting participants or the gun-toting protesters. If one were not already scared, these endless images create massive fear. The cable news providers hold themselves harmless, arguing that “Hey, it’s news, and it’s what our viewers want!” I don’t. A freshman level course in social psychology would readily demonstrate that cable news outlets have become key players in upping the ante on terror, distrust, and distortion. A picture actually is worth a thousand words.

Getting positional, I have to admit that I have little hope for alternative behaviors from Fox News. They have built their success on appealing to the worst angels of our nature, and seem unlikely to abandon their lucrative formula. Misinformation works for them. Many of their viewers are my demographic, older people, and I empathize with their fear and understand the disorientation that goes with rapid change. Just watch Senators, who have a mean age of 63.

I do, however, have more hope for their competitors. Maybe Soledad O’Brien could do a special on Health Care in America. Maybe we could seduce the superb international journalists, Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour, to go local and study health care options. Maybe the pundits at MSNBC could watch the Rachel Maddow show.

I have noticed that when cable news folk are criticized they usually get pretty defensive. Fine. I am here suggesting, however, that after the knee jerk, and understandable, defensive posturing they take a few minutes to engage in reflective discernment and self evaluation, ask more of themselves, imagine their extraordinary potential to do the good thing rather than the expedient thing.

Cable news could be helping us by put a human face on the endless statistics they report. They could be helping us become informed rather than scared. They could be good citizens and good journalists at the same time. A lot of us would welcome cable news that called forth the higher angels of our nature. I think Abraham Lincoln would approve too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Health Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.