Albuquerque Journal: Hawking the GOP Line on Health Insurance Reform

It's always an adventure to retrieve the Albuquerque Journal from my driveway each morning, sit down at our round table in the den with a steaming cup of strong coffee, take the rubber band off the paper and check out the latest snowjobs the editors are offering to a dwindling number of readers. Yesterday morning, I hit the jackpot on page A6 -- an entire page devoted to coverage of the huge victory achieved in the U.S. House this Saturday by Democrats and a single Republican in passing H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Well, unfortunately but not surprisingly, the historic win was characterized by the Journal's headline writers as something less than stellar. Journal editors must have searched for hours to find two of the most negative articles on health insurance reform to be found among the day's AP offerings -- and then burned the candle at both ends to craft incredibly negative headlines.

AP Article #1
The first AP article, by Richard Alonzo-Zaldivar, was presented with a main headline that reads "House Health Bill Stumbles in Senate" -- with a subhead adding that "Moderate Dems Fight Option." I'd put a link to the article but I can't find it on the misbegotten online Journal website. I entered "House Health Bill Stumbles" in the search engine and was taken to a slew of articles offering health tips. So I'll type in a few nuggets from the article, including this opener:

The glow from a health care triumph faded quickly for President Barack Obama on Sunday as Democrats realized the bill they fought so hard to pass in the House has nowhere to go in the Senate.

Yes, folks, might as well fold up the tent. Sen. Joe Lieberman (Only Me Party-CT) will have the last say and nothing can be done. Oddly, the reporter seems unaware that the House bill was never designed to go to the Senate for passage. The Senate is drafting its own bill and it hasn't yet been unveiled or brought to the floor.

The real battle will come once the Senate passes their version of the reform bill -- whether or not it has a public option -- and the conference committee blends the two bills. So it's still anybody's guess what will be in the final bill, and how members of Congress will vote when push comes to shove and it's now or never on health insurance reform. I expect President Obama and his crew will be applying maximum pressure on recalcitrant Dems at that point. We'll see how Lieberman and other "moderates" respond.

Onward -- next we read the shocking news that a right-wing ideologue doesn't like the bill:

"The House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said dismissively [emphasis added].

Democrats did not line up to challenge him [emphasis added].

I guess Mr. Alonso-Zaldivar was watching Graham as he made his pronouncement and looked around to see not one Dem lining up to challenge him -- wherever that took place.

I always love it when bought-off Senators like Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) are labeled "moderates," as they are in this article. I don't know what's moderate about a Senator -- who has snarfed down tens of thousands of dollars of health industry "donations" -- being against a proposal that would bring much-needed relief to the tens of thousands of uninsured and under-insured residents of his or her state. Sounds like cold-blooded greed to me. Nothing "moderate" about it. And as to "moderate" Joey, his wife has taken in big bucks from the health industry for many years. According to Joe Conason:

For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them.

So Joementum isn't really coming from the "moderate" or "centrist" point of view -- he's doing the family's monetary benefactors a favor.

Anyway, the article reports at the end that, "Lieberman appeared on "Fox News Sunday," while Graham was on CBS' "Face the Nation." I guess Mr. Alonso-Zaldivar didn't notice any supporters of reform and the public option on any of the political talk shows Sunday, so he couldn't provide their opposing views.

The same AP reporter joined with Erica Warner of the AP to provide a comparison of the House and Senate health insurance reform bills that takes up four columns on the right side of Page A6. I'm not sure how much I trust the comparison given Alonso-Zaldivar's article.

AP Article #2
At the bottom of Page A6 we have another AP article, this one by Douglass K. Daniel, with the headline, "GOP Officials Say Democrats Put Agenda Ahead Country," with a subhead that reads "Republicans say voters are tired of spending, bailouts." (Of course there is no article on what Democratic officials say.) This screed starts out,

Democrats just don't get the election message from voters and are pushing a liberal, big government agenda at their party's peril, Republican officials said Sunday as they predicted a political price after the majority's victory on health care.

... "On a narrow partisan vote, the Democrats put their liberal, big government agenda ahead of the American people," [Rep. Mike] Pence said. "If Democrats keep ignoring the the American people, their party's going to be history in about a year."

In a week that featured both the AMA and AARP publicly endorsing the Dem plan, as well as tea party madness on Capitol hill that included a photo banner linking the effect of the Dem plan to a pile of dead bodies at the Nazi death camp at Dachau, Pence might be overreaching just a bit in his assessment. The article also ignores the fact that the GOP "reform" plan was rated as pretty much useless by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation:

By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 3 million relative to current law, leaving about 52 million nonelderly residents uninsured. The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage in 2019 would be about 83 percent, roughly in line with the current share.

Regardless, I don't think we'll ever see a headline in the Journal that reads, "GOP Health Insurance Reform Bill Rated as Disaster by CBO."

PS. I want to make it clear that I'm not bagging the Journal in its entirety. In my daily morning read, I often encounter terrific stories by reporters like John Fleck, Leslie Linthicum, Joline Gutierrez-Krueger and others. It's the mixing of editorial biases with news that gets my goat.

Of course the masters at keeping tabs on the Journal are over at Albuquerque Journal Watch where former Journal reporters Denise Tessier and Tracy Dingmann critically examine the journalistic practices of New Mexico's largest newspaper.