Media Matters slams WaPo, American Cancer Society. (Just kidding.)
2009 November 19
tags: Fox News, George Soros, Glenn Beck Program, Media Matters, News, NewsRealblog, Politicsby Kathy Shaidle
Cartoon by Henry Payne (Townhall.com 8/17/09)
Media Matters’ selective outrage is on full display today. They declare, “Beck, Limbaugh, and Hannity link nonbinding mammogram guidelines to ‘death panels’”:
Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity have linked a task force’s recommendation that fewer women younger than 50 receive regular mammograms to the widely debunked smear that Democratic health reform bills include “death panels.” Right-wing media figures have repeatedly raised the specter of these purported panels in their discussions of health care; in this case, their fearmongering is undermined by the fact that the recommendations are not legally binding on health care providers or insurers.
This really is getting tiresome. Not even your average Democratic legislator is dumb enough to literally put the phrase “death panels” in a bill. However, in nations where socialized medicine is the norm, powerful decision making entities that sound awfully similar to “death panels” do function, complete with Orwellian names like “NICE”.
They have to, because “free” health “care” can only “work” in a system based upon often irrational rationing. I know: I’m a Canadian citizen.
There’s more:
…the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology and other experts condemned the change (…)
“Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and these idiots want to do away with it,” said Daniel B. Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s crazy — unethical, really.”
Some questioned whether the new guidelines were designed more to control spending than to improve health. (…)
The new recommendations took on added significance because under health-care reform legislation pending in Congress, the conclusions of the 16-member task force would set standards for what preventive services insurance plans would be required to cover at little or no cost.
Say, who are all those lying, fearmongering radical crazies?
Well, that’s actually a November 16 story in the Washington Post — not generally regarded as a right wing paper. WaPo first broke that “mammogram” story, not anyone on Fox News or talk radio.
But don’t wait for the disingenuous ideologues at Media Matters to call the Washington Post part of the right wing smear machine, or start comparing a Harvard professor to Glenn Beck, or the former head of the Red Cross to Ann Coulter.
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