Whap! Whap!

This is not, strictly speaking, about newspapers. Then again, with the announcement of AP and 25 papers defining congressional earmarks as their critical campaign issue, maybe it is.

Apologists for the American health-care system long argued that we have the best quality of care in the world. That notion has largely been debunked, so the apologists cite the bureaucratic nightmare national health care would create. Hmmm. Let me tell you about bureaucratic nightmares …

Last week, we received a refund for an overpayment we made to a hospital. An overpayment we made in 2006.

This week, we received a letter from a collection agency for services rendered in January 2008. A bill for services the hospital has acknowledged, on several occasions, that we don’t even owe. After hours of frustrating calls, both the hospital and the collection agency have agreed to send us letters acknowledging their error. Anyone want to bet we don’t get one or both of those letters? Anyone want to bet we’ve heard the last from these folks?

In summary. When a hospital owes a patient a debt it doesn’t dispute, it takes two years to pay it (without interest). When a patient is wrongly billed, that bill makes it to a collection agency in four months (plus 15 percent interest).

And government health care would be a bureaucratic nightmare?

Yet the press mostly lets politicians skate when it comes to health care. John McCain mumbles something about health care here being the best in the world and the only fixes it needs is to stop malpractice suits, allow people to buy drugs from Canada and to slow the skyrocketing costs. Debate moderators and pundits yawn and nod their heads and get back to attacking Hillary Clinton’s depiction of her Bosnia visit and Barack Obama’s pastor scandal du jour.

Oh yes, and then papers ignore the issues of the day to instead eagerly jump on John McCain’s earmark bandwagon.

Maybe this really is about newspapers after all.

So reporter Jessica Yellin says ABC News execs told her to go easy on President Bush when his approval ratings were high (here from Politico). No surprise there.

Ironic, though, isn’t it? These same ABC execs defended their attack on Barack Obama during the debate by saying it was justified because he was the frontrunner … i.e. most popular.

Here’s a guarantee. If Obama wins in November, the mainstream media will attack his every hiccup, regardless of how high his approval ratings are.

Why are the mainstream media so focused on whether George Bush was referring to Barack Obama when he made his “appeasement” remarks in the Knesset? Isn’t the real story that he just went to a foreign country and slandered many millions of patriotic Americans by calling them appeasers?

Personifying the comment could be just more of the lazy, horse-race reporting we’ve seen through the campaign. It could be that once again the media is picking up the GOP’s playbook, pinning a label on a Democrat.

And it’s true that Obama created some of the distraction himself by assuming it was a slap at him. That still doesn’t excuse the pundits for not exploring the deeper slander.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy is based entirely on liberal fantasy, according to Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News.

If he’s right, then other liberals include Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the entire Iraq Study Group. Obama’s crime is calling for diplomacy with countries such as Iran. Did the conservative press label Reagan a liberal for negotiating with the Iranians who took Americans hostage?

There’s something even more sinister in many of the attacks on Obama, and Goodwin’s piece is a prime example. Obama’s comments about negotiating with our “enemies” included folks like Hugo Chavez, yet Goodwin consistently portrays Obama has being soft on Muslims. Last time I looked, Chavez wasn’t Muslim. Neither are the leaders of South Korea or many other countries we’re not friendly with.

Last time I looked, most Muslims weren’t enemies of the United States. By all accounts, some of our best friends are Muslim, even those who despise George Bush’s policies.

So why twist this into religion? Is it to continue the insinuation that Obama is Muslim? Is it to cast Muslims in a bad light to illustrate why it would be such a bad thing if he were Muslim? Venezuela is overwhelmingly Catholics, but I haven’t heard the President or anyone else suggest that negotiating with Chavez would be wrong because it would be appeasing Christians (to these unreconstructed Cold Warriors, that’s bad because it appeases communists).

Goodwin also dismisses the economic problems that are fueling anger among some Muslims. The conservatives have to dismiss these concerns so people will go on believing that their belief in Islam is the only reason some Muslims want change.

So get ready for the storyline this summer and fall: Obama is Muslim. Oh wait, no he isn’t; he’s a radical Christian who listens to his minister. Oh wait, he disavowed that minister, so maybe he’s a Muslim sympathizer after all.

Since the press obviously isn’t going to drop this story, I hope we continue to read it for the next eight years as the establishment press attacks President Barack Obama.

That’s my liberal fantasy.

James Burnett of the Miami Herald makes a great point. Barack Obama is half-black, half-white, yet the mainstream media (and alas yes, I too) call him black. Mr. Burnett suggests that he’s going to start calling Mr. Obama the white candidate because, after all, he’s half white. You really should read this. Why can’t newspapers (instead of their blogs) make this kind of point more often?

Google “can obama win white vote” today and you get about 15,000 responses. Most are duplicates of the same few wire stories, but many are not, and almost all raise the same specter: Barack Obama can’t win in November because he can’t win the white vote.

First, that’s far from a fact. He has won millions of white votes, including mine. Second, Democrats have won three of the last four presidential popular votes, and lost the white vote each time, so why is it necessary for Obama to win it this time? Would Hillary Clinton win the white vote in November? Her husband never did.

So are these news stories really serious analysis of an important issue, or just another way to undermine Obama’s campaign? I would suggest a little bit of both.

Newspaper reporters and editors choose what to define as “news.” Let’s look at the track record so far: Jeremiah Wright is news; John Hagee is not. Bill Clinton’s fortune is news; Cindy McCain’s is not. Barack Obama has never run a business or been a government, which is news; John McCain hasn’t either, but who cares? It’s news that white racists won’t vote for Obama; it’s not news that they apparently will vote for Clinton or Obama …

The analysis so far boils down to little more than stereotypes and assumptions. It’s apparently safe to assume, for example, that white Democrats who have voted for Clinton over Obama naturally will vote for McCain over Obama. Obama is elitist because he’s not winning the blue-collar white vote; Clinton and McCain aren’t winning the blue-collar black vote, but that doesn’t make them elitist.

Not all newspaper columnists have toed the line, of course. Here’s my favorite quote: “Racists should decide the Democratic nomination,” Issac J. Bailey wrote Friday in the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Sun News. “Sen. Hillary Clinton didn’t use those words in an interview with USA Today, but she came close.” (Which I pulled from an excellent piece in the Black Star News).

Overall, however, the tone of coverage has been “We newspaper folks are not at all racist, of course, but there are so many racists out there that you’re taking a big risk by voting for a black guy. It might be safer to vote for the white candidate instead. That will show those racists!”

I am not suggesting most newspaper people are racist. I definitely am suggesting that most have a conservative bias. Conservative conventional wisdom is that you need the white vote to win elections, even if you have to offend the non-white vote to get it.

Newspapers are reinforcing that “wisdom.”

So I’m a white guy in rural Oregon and I’m more excited about Obama than about any candidate in decades, but that’s not a story to the mainstream media. Now if I hated him, that would be another story.

Literally.

Nick Denton writes on Gawker that the New York Times should admit that the line between news and opinion is blurry. The paper is not objective, he says.

I agree completely. And I disagree totally.

I agree that the New York Times is not objective. That is not, however, as Mr. Denton suggests, the result of some policy change specific to the Times. No newspaper, in fact no reporter, is objective, because objectivity is impossible. I remember a line from a book on scientific objectivity from my college days: Inherent in any observation is an aetiology and a prognosis.

Where Mr. Denton and I really disagree, however, is in his sweeping conclusion: “The newspaper’s proprietors and editors are obviously moderate liberals, and the conservative columnists are either watered-down or compromised, as token as the useless liberals allowed to whine on Fox News—but the Times can’t acknowledge that it’s partisan.”

The paper is obviously liberal! And Mr. Denton offers a stunning array of evidence to support this dubious conclusion. Some examples: The paper’s coverage of Heath Ledger’s death and its attacks Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and on Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Liberal? In fact, none of his examples is remotely liberal, ranging from non-partisan sensationalism to a deeply conservative bias. But to Mr. Denton, it all adds up to an obvious liberal bias.

His comment about opinion columnists is equally dubious. Conservatives are watered-down and compromised? Where? How? David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are hardly watered down. I’m not suggesting that the Times opinion columns are overwhelmingly conservative, not with Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and others, but they certainly are not overwhelmingly liberal.

Paul Krugman and Frank Rich both proudly wave the liberal flag, but Brooks and Dowd don’t similarly wave the conservative flag. Perhaps that gives the appearance of liberal bias, but it’s acknowledged liberal bias, which is what Mr. Denton is calling for. It’s the conservative bias that isn’t acknowledged.

Worse, Mr. Denton laments the bias in news coverage. The Times’ incessant cheerleading for the Bush administration in its news coverage leading up to the Iraq War by Judith Miller and others can hardly be construed as liberal. That coverage warmed the hearts of even the most-ardent neocon, but I don’t know that liberals were similarly entranced by the Times’ suggestion of a Heath Ledger-Mary Kate Olsen connection, which Mr. Denton uses several times to support his charge of liberal bias.

But the Times ran a news story about John McCain and his ties to a lobbyist. Liberal bias! Except it ran a Page 1 attack piece on Barack Obama, with Deval Patrick as proxy, on Page 1 at about the same time.

So you’re right, Mr. Denton.

And oh, so totally mistaken.

Listen to the drumbeat from media pundits about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

The Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd and most of the rest of the fair and balanced press corps argue that if the constant negative coverage of Obama-Wright doesn’t stop soon, Obama’s campaign is going to suffer. Is that a promise or a threat?

There is only one way to stop the attacks against Wright and Obama. It’s for the people making them to stop making them. That means you, Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd, et al. They could end this debacle today.

But they don’t. Why? Polls suggest the public cares very little about the “controversy.”

Think about the corollary: What if these pundits said “If we ever start comparing John McCain to his controversial and unpopular supporter, George W. Bush, he’s going to be in trouble. What if we led every op-ed page, every broadcast, every letters to the editor page with constant negative coverage of this relationship? What would happen to McCain’s campaign?”

The irony is that the public, by far, considers McCain-Bush a bigger problem than Obama-Wright. There’s good reason to think that if the “liberal” media turned their attack against McCain, his campaign would be toast. But far from playing up the near mirror-image relationship between the two, the press continues to try to protect McCain with absurd articles about what a maverick he is.

Editors and publishers wonder why readers think they’re full of crap. There are many reasons we think that. The fact that they’re far to the right of mainstream thought is one big one.