Sunday, June 21, 2009
ABC Self-Nationalizes For Obama
But that's the story as ABC crosses the line from journalism to advocacy in turning its coverage of health care over to the White House.
This Wednesday, on every show from "Good Morning America" (kicking things off with an interview with the president) to "World News Tonight" (broadcast from the Blue Room) to a prime-time special called "Prescription for America" (and emanating from the East Room), the network will puff the Obama administration's trillion-dollar plan to nationalize U.S. health care.
The all-day, White House-based coverage itself amounts to a nationalization — this one of a major media outlet in support of an administration that will return the favor for access at the cost of objectivity and the public's right to know.
Don't think it isn't. This isn't your grandfather's propaganda. Forget public service announcements. Just as some newspaper ads trick themselves up to look like news stories to enhance their credibility, making a partisan program indistinguishable from the nightly "news" is a propaganda tool in the same vein.
Nobody has figured this out better than Barack Obama's political operation, which has manipulated almost all the mainstream media since he began running for the presidency.
Under the cover of news, ABC can present the president's side of the health reform issue as "factual" and leave out the real costs and concerns about government control and rationing of health care. Personal stories that tug at the heartstrings will be featured prominently, as will unchallenged canards about the wonders of socialized medicine....
...ABC insists it will present a balanced picture — as balanced, we suppose, as the political contributions of ABC News employees who gave 80 times more to Obama's campaign ($124,421 to $1,550) as they did to his opponent, John McCain....