Playing the Journalism Roles on TV

Norman Solomon
Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800
Opinion

When the word got out that President-elect Obama was planning to nominate CNN's chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be the next surgeon general of the United States, the media responses were mixed. Some noted that Dr. Gupta is a proven communicator on health-related subjects — after all, he's a real doctor and he plays one on television.

"Gupta has always been drawn to health policy," The Washington Post reported. "He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of South Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman."

But some critics, mindful that physicians and journalists alike are supposed to be factually accurate, noted that Gupta has been known to play fast and loose with key facts to fit in with his preferences on national health policy.
Updated: Fri Jan 09, 2009

When the word got out that President-elect Obama was planning to nominate CNN's chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be the next surgeon general of the United States, the media responses were mixed. Some noted that Dr. Gupta is a proven communicator on health-related subjects — after all, he's a real doctor and he plays one on television.

"Gupta has always been drawn to health policy," The Washington Post reported. "He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton. His appointment would give the administration a prominent official of South Asian descent and a skilled television spokesman."

But some critics, mindful that physicians and journalists alike are supposed to be factually accurate, noted that Gupta has been known to play fast and loose with key facts to fit in with his preferences on national health policy.

"I don't have a problem with Gupta's qualifications" to be surgeon general, wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. "But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over 'Sicko.' You don't have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore 'fudged his facts,' when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong."

These were not random disputes over matters of fact. Gupta was, in effect, defending the interests of the corporate medical industry — and falsely claiming that the anti-corporate filmmaker Moore had his facts wrong. In a Jan. 6 comment posted on his Times Web page, Krugman pointed out that "appointing Gupta now, although it's a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way."

While Obama's move to appoint Gupta could be seen as a clever media strategy to tap a popular TV journalist for the surgeon general post, it should matter that Gupta has a somewhat tarnished record of asserting nonfactual "facts" about healthcare policies.

On corporate television — and along Pennsylvania Avenue — getting things wrong "in a socially acceptable way" routinely entails promoting the interests of healthcare behemoths like insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and hospital corporations.

In the retrospective light of the dustup between Gupta and Moore, on Wednesday, an analyst with the media watchdog group FAIR (where I'm an associate) commented that apparently the nominee's "most relevant experience in communicating about healthcare reform is arguing dishonestly against proposals for a single-payer healthcare system."

This particular matter is a small subset of a pervasive problem. Increasingly, on network television, strong advocates for policy directions — including people with long records of employment by political parties and candidates — are apt to be put forward as journalists.

Fortunately, this country doesn't try to license practitioners of journalism. But, on a daily basis, we do need to apply some standards as we assess the quality of what's put forward as journalism.

In its last issue of 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review published an editorial under the headline "Drawing Lines." The subhead — "Why do we let political operatives act like journalists?" — summed up the problem.

The editorial provided some telling examples: "Michael Gerson, a former adviser to President Bush, writes a column for The Washington Post; Joe Scarborough, a former congressman, hosts a news show on MSNBC; Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris and Karl Rove are analysts on Fox News; CNN's Best Political Team on Television has Donna Brazile, Bill Bennett, Ed Gibson, Paul Begala, et al, sitting cheek-by-jowl with actual journalists like John King and Campbell Brown. How can we expect viewers to not lump us all together?"

It's up to viewers to distinguish between a journalist and someone who merely plays one on TV.

Norman Solomon wrote the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com