CJR's Greg Marx has a nice post up assessing the value of targeting professional health care dissembler Betsy McCaughey.
On the one hand, as he notes, she's had a profoundly negative impact on mainstream debate and deserves to be "named and shamed" for her deceptions. For that reason, I'm happy to see TNR publishing a lengthy McCaughey takedown (especially given the magazine's role in her rise to media stardom).
However, like Marx, I don't see the value in bringing her on TV to berate her (as MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan did). At some point, it's time to move past McCaughey and think about the larger problem she represents, as Marx argues:
[P]utting McCaughey on TV does imply a certain legitimacy. Against that concern, what is the corresponding benefit, other than giving the host a chance to take a scalp?
By this point, any media outlet that’s been paying attention has made a decision about McCaughey’s credibility... The campaign against McCaughey has been welcome, but barring radical changes in the media environment, if we’re talking health care again in 2025, she’ll surely find an outlet for her claims again. The key is how the rest of the media responds.
This is the other danger, one that both Nyhan and Klein note—the possibility that by focusing on McCaughey personally, we may overlook the deeper patterns she has been able to exploit. As Klein writes, the problem is that “McCaughey isn’t just a liar. She’s an exciting liar”:
That’s not very helpful in the policy debate, but it’s very useful in the media debate… McCaughey might be something of a uniquely deceptive individual, but she’s taking advantage of a structural weakness in the system.
The upshot is that we need to address that “structural weakness”—not, at this point, keep competing to see who can do the best job of filleting McCaughey.
The "structural weakness" Marx refers to is actually the failure of the bill's sponsors to fully and accurately tell the public what's in the bills. The best way to refute McCaughey would be for the sponsors of health reform to present a comprehensive outline of the various bills, including a discussion of any items that might be changed before the bills are finalized, as well as any items that will depend on administrative decisions to be made after the law is in effect. In other words, if the sponsors would fully and accurately tell the public just how Health Reform would work, they would leave no room for lies about supposedly hidden provisions.
However, the sponsors of health reform are doing just the opposite. It's my understanding that the various versions of health reform have not been fully released to the public. And, the Dems are resisting releasing the final bill to the public with enough time to digest and understand it before the final vote is held.
BTW I don't like how something is or isn't called a "lie." There are innumerable aspects where nobody really knows how Health Reform will actually work. Statements that assume Health Reform will work well are called "truths" by liberals while statements that assume certain problems will occur are called "lies." In fact, both sets of statements are just guesses as to how the final system will operate.
Posted by: David | October 08, 2009 at 02:34 PM
A lie is when you misrepresent something.
Having a different idea about the prospects for success or failure is having an opinion.
Posted by: Howard Craft | October 09, 2009 at 09:08 AM