Obama has repeatedly criticized the 24/7 media culture and cable-generated conflict, complaining during a town-hall meeting on health care last week that "the media ends up completely distorting what's taking place." Press secretary Robert Gibbs said on the "Today" show: "We all have something to lose, Matt, if we let cable television come to town-hall meetings and kill health-care reform for another year."
From Howard Kurtz's column this morning.
Expect that to be the new rallying cry from Daily Kos & Kompany: Cable news is killing "health care reform" by covering town hall meetings. Two weeks ago, on "Fox News Watch," Jane Hall, a thoughtful moderate liberal, made the point that if the media are supportive of the Obamacare plan, "they sure ain't helping." That is, the coverage of the town halls was highlighting opposition, and thus energizing opponents. (The planted assumptions in Hall's argument, of course, is that of course the media are supporting the plan, and of course, they should support it--they're just doing a bad job.
And on "News Watch" this past Saturday, Kirsten Powers made an additional useful point: She said that the first of the cable newsers to really cover the town hall protests was MSNBC, which covered them in the hope that ordinary people would end up looking foolish. But obviously, it went the other way: As Jim Pinkerton said on the same show, the polls show that a plurality of Americans support the protestors, and by an even wider margin, they oppose the health care bill.
No wonder Gibbs hates cable news.
