There is a good post over at the TAPPED blog about the media’ culpability in the health care fight. The post approving quotes TNR’s The Treatment which calls the health care debate the best covered news story, ever. There, Harold Pollack calls “Press coverage of health care reform was the most careful, most thorough, and most effective reporting of any major story, ever” especially once you add up all of the newspaper, broadcast and blog time devoted to it.
“If people don’t look, there is only so much the media can do,” Pollack writes.
I agree, and it is why so much of media criticism is so tiresome. The media critics always complain about what a lousy job us pressmen are doing, and base this on how ill-informed the public seems to be. In fact, of course, the public is ill-informed because in the hustle of their lives, they care little, and they do not believe much of what happens in the corridors of power matters to them. When the media tries to make the story a little sexier, they are accused of dumbing it down. When they get all wonkish, they are ignored.
