Thursday, July 23, 2009

Curious Choice by Globe

The President had a prime-time speech on health care, perhaps the most important issue facing this country, and that gets second billing to the President's relatively brief comments at the presser about the Gates situation in Cambridge. If you just looked at the Globe's front-page briefly today, you'd think the press conference was about "Gatesgate" (and they can't even manage to get that story right, making the same mistake Maddow did the night before).

Question for the Globe: Were these three minutes and thirty three seconds really more important than the rest of the entire press conference or the issue of health care? No doubt, there's a local interest to the Gates story. However, contrary to whatever the gatekeeper editors at the Globe think, there's an even bigger local interest in health care.

What kind of a local interest? We're getting new windows put in my house today. The window guy just lost his home recently, one that he built himself. Why? He got sick. It put him out of work for a while. There were also fewer jobs. Deductibles and co-pays added up. He had health insurance and still went bankrupt. Now he's better -- and lost his home. There's literally hundreds or thousands of people like him in Massachusetts today, just in the past few years, due to our country's sorry state in health care and economy. The Globe chose not to cover that kind of local interest.

David, along with others, almost blames Obama for this hiccup. Obama chose to answer the Gates question. He could have - and probably should have - skipped the question, since it didn't reinforce the night's health care message. However, the Globe (and other media outlets) have decided to play race over health care. They've decided to ignore the more important story over the sensational one -- that will no doubt be well handled by Gates and Harvard Law. It was the media's choice to pounce on that 3 minutes and 33 seconds, not Obama's.

If and when the Globe goes under, it's going to go because it became a newspaper of the high-end condos and retailers - and not of the middle-class workers who struggle every day. While the Globe publishes stories that belittle second-hand stores in JP, they ignore the thousands of people who are crying out for major reforms in health care -- and the President who's actually working on their behalf. Sadly, the Globe's forgotten who their readers are -- which, in the newspaper biz, is worse than being obsolete. The dead trees could live on if what was printed on them actually interested readers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Speaking of health care, where do you weigh in on the so called "Fat Tax", putting an extra tax on soda, candy etc?

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