Health care/birther misinformation playbook

Between the birthers who promote the myth that the President was not born in this country and opponents of health care reform who falsely claim the legislation would promote euthanasia, there is a lot of misinformation floating around about the Obama administration. That shouldn't be surprising, though; Obama's honeymoon is ending.

What is striking is the extent to which birthers, led by Orley Taitz, and the health care misinformers, led by Betsy McCaughey, are working from a similar playbook. Here's an outline of how the process works:

1. Take a complicated issue that people don't understand (e.g. presidential citizenship reqirements and Hawaiian birth records or the complex health care reform bills pending in Congress).
2. Advance a disturbing hypothesis about the issue that will appeal to your side of the aisle (e.g. Obama isn't a legitimate president; the health bill will take away your freedom).
3. Misconstrue available evidence to construct arguments supporting your point.
4. Promote these myths widely. If you are successful enough in doing so, the media will feel obligated to report on them. Coverage will then frequently be presented in an artificially balanced "he said," "she said" format, giving further credence to your claims.
5. When your arguments are debunked, claim that the media is trying to silence you to prevent the truth from being revealed.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until various elites (e.g. John Boehner on health, Lou Dobbs on Obama's birth certificate) start claiming you have raised legitimate questions about the issue of interest.

It's been reasonably well-documented how Taitz and her allies have followed this process in promoting the birth certificate myth, but I'm not sure if most people understand the extent to which McCaughey -- a more mainstream figure -- has used an almost identical approach to promote several falsehoods about health care reform.

Following the model of her infamous 1994 New Republic article on the Clinton health care plan, McCaughey has cycled through steps 3-5 above three times this year. First, Bloomberg published a commentary in which she falsely claimed in February to have discovered a provision in the stimulus bill that would lead to government control of medical treatments. Then, in June, she falsely claimed on CNBC that "the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans" and was given space to make similar claims by the New York Daily News and the Wall Street Journal. Now she's been spending the last few weeks promoting the false claim that the health care legislation in Congress would promote euthanasia, which was again featured in the Wall Street Journal and on former Sen. Fred Thompson's radio show.

Each of these myths was widely disseminated in the news media, but the euthanasia claim has received the most enthusiastic response from sympathetic elites. It's already been parroted by the RNC and various pundits as well as Republican members of Congress like Rep. Virginia Foxx, who suggested on the House floor that the Democratic plan would "put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government." As a result, it is now circulating widely at the grassroots level.

Who's to blame for this problem? I largely fault the media. While the Obama administration's message strategy has hardly been perfect, it's absurd to say, as Cynthia Tucker did on This Week, that Obama "allowed the opposition [to health care reform] to scare people" (my emphasis). In a polarized political system, the McCaughey/Taitz approach to concocting and promoting misinformation probably would have worked no matter what the White House did. As Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias recently argued, it's extremely difficult to myth-proof a bill or to effectively counter these claims once they are made. Until the media stops giving airtime and column inches to proponents of misinformation, the playbook is going to keep working.

Comments

[Jack Davis]

You make a valid criticism of the media in the last paragraph. Journalists are trained to see both sides to every issue, even where one side is just wrong (e.g., vaccine/autism "debate.") Excellent post.

[David]

I'm with Brendan on the birther issue. However, IMHO virtually no criticism of Obama's health reform bill is unfair. Why do we have to be fair to the bill when the bill isn't fair to us?

In the best of worlds, media pundits would have read and thought about the bill. They would fully understand it. Then if some criticism were inaccurate, the pundits could easily point out the inaccuracies and supply a correction.

Unfortunately, in the real world, hardly anybody has read the bill. It's much too long and complicated. I would bet that Brendan Nyhan hasn't read and digested the bill. I think he's taking on faith the assertion that certain criticism is inaccurate.

Furthermore, even reading and understanding the bill wouldn't be enough, because Dem leaders might add another 300 pages the day before the vote, as they have done before. For all intents and purposes, the plan is pretty close to a black box.

Another problem is that some key aspects of the plan will be administrative decisions that aren't in the bill. E.g., some Obama Administration representative have implied or talked vaguely about some sort of limitations or restrictions of health care to the elderly. AFAIK the precise limitations are not in the bill. Some appointees would presumably be empowered to decide how, when, and for whom to limit coverage. Given the Administration's lack of transparency, I don't think it's unfair for critics to assume the worst.

The Dems should produce a comprehensible bill that represents their final approach. They should give Congress, the public and the media enough time to fully understand it and to debate it. If they took that approach, I would join Brendan in condemning unfair criticism of the health reform bill.

[bonncaruso]

Sometimes you need to carpetbomb the opposition when occasions like this arise. The Obama administration needs to go on the offensive more than ever.

The bill will pass - health care will start to take effect and in 6 years we will be able to make the first real evaluations of the whole thing.

[Dave M]

Brendan,

Now that we're all witnessing the continued success of the birther/healthcare campaigns against the Democratic party, are you rethinking your earlier recommendation to "shame" those responsible for propagating misperceptions? (I noticed that this was the same question your NPR interviewer put to you)

Since there's clearly a lot of money and power involved with winning or losing these battles, why would any professional politician (or the lobbyists etc. he employs) worry about the isolated factchecking operations that are scolding them? What's their downside, in a porous, myopic, amnesiac media environment that is the opposite of the kind of face to face communities in which such sanctions might work?

I'm also wondering whether the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert approach of spoofing such false beliefs is a more effective way of undoing their hold than a step by step refutation. Is there any research on this?

Thanks, DM

[anon]

I'm seriously tempted to just start saying the Republican plan for healthcare reform adds $2 Trillion to the deficit, makes it illegal to get insurance from your union, and will make it impossible to buy insurance if you earn less than $250,000 a year.

Yeah, it's made-up. But seriously, if that's what journalism is these days, let's all just run with it.

And don't get me started on the absurdity that journalists won't cover single-payer advocates because single-payer is never going to pass, but they will cover the anti government-takeover of medicine crowd. If the bill isn't on the table, neither its supporters nor its opponents are relevant. And yet I'm hearing hours of coverage for people in town halls who are shrieking that Medicare is unconstitutional.

[brendan]

But the Republican Plan WILL cost $2 trillion, and WILL be unavailable/unaffordable for anyone making less than $250,000 per year, and WILL outlaw getting your health insurance through your union.
email this 'article' to a friend.

[Dave M]

Hi Brendan,

Is your 9.05 response an evasion of my question, which was a genuine one? Or a parody of some sort? Or a desire to invent a case of equivalence, to show that "both sides do it," even when you're documenting an overwhelming preponderance of money and party organization on one side? If so, this is not funny, sorta like Milbank and Cilizza's skits were epically unfunny.

I find it as disappointing as this:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Can you give me one example where this [shaming of the media] worked?

BRENDAN NYHAN: [SIGHS] Oh, geez. [LAUGHS] Um -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah, I thought so.

Don't you think you can do better than this? Maybe provide some better analysis, even if your proposed remedy doesn't seem to be working? I'd rather hear that the situation is "scary," than this kind of stuff, which I think is contemptuous of the people who have to live with the consequences of elite irresponsibility.

Best wishes,

DM

[bnyhan]

Dave M, that wasn't me. All comments by me (the author of this blog) will use my full Typepad profile. As far as your previous questions, I recognize that the odds are stacked against the media; the "shaming" strategy is far from foolproof. I don't know of any research on Stewart/Colbert-type mockery, but I see it as integral to the shaming strategy and advocated it as a response to misinformation in the conclusion to All the President's Spin. Finally, I'm not sure what taking one line out of context from a 20+ minute interview (before editing) accomplishes -- that's an extremely unfair representation of my work.

[Dave M]

Whoops, sorry about that. Please accept my apologies.

As for the shaming strategy, I think it's an intriguing idea, but the point I've been circling around is that the anonymity and porosity of today's media environment makes such sanctions very difficult to enforce. My claim would be that satire is what you use when shame ceases to function. So the style in which the shame is communicated makes a good deal of difference in its effectiveness.

And it would be nice if those in the media did stuff like this more often:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/06/rick-sanchez-grills-rick_n_253389.html

Best wishes,

DM