PBS And Health-Care Hypocrites
By Brent Bozell
July 15, 2009
Struggling to sell a "public option" of socialized medicine on America, the left needs demons. So here comes, right on time, the focus on all the "lies" that free-market "front groups" are pushing on the failures of nationalized health care in countries like Canada and Great Britain.
These leftists are shameless. Their intellectual dishonesty is boundless. One wonders if socialized medicine might include treatment for this condition.
A man named Wendell Potter was the star of the hour on PBS's "Bill Moyers Journal" on July 10. Potter used to be a spokesman for the insurance giant Cigna. He painted a picture of gilded excess. "I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with." Sitting in a spacious corporate jet, he said he was overcome by guilt at the gap between his creature comforts and the health struggles of the poor and uninsured.
He became a convert to the socialist cause by remembering the Kennedys. One of JFK's favorite quotes, he said, was a Dante line that "the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." He panicked. "I'm headed for that hottest place in Hell, unless I say something."
That's a tidy story. Moyers unveiled it carefully, which is to say: keeping some details hidden. Potter has a new job, a senior fellow at a radical left-wing group called the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD touts how Potter's "working with us to examine the role of the powerful insurance industry in undermining, manipulating and thwarting reform."
Potter's so enthusiastically leftist now that he and Moyers discussed how Michael Moore's mockumentary "Sicko" was a misunderstood work of genius. But Potter's job was never revealed to the Moyers audience. Why not?
Moyers was hiding more than that. CMD's website touts a rapturous endorsement from ... none other than Bill Moyers. "[N]ot a day goes by that I don't go to their website for a stirring encounter with the truth of America. You should visit their website," Moyers told the crowd of a CMD reception in Manhattan in 2005. "They do the best journalism about what is really happening in this country to our media system. I couldn't exist as a journalist without it, nor would I want to as a citizen. It arms me with the information that I need, reporting that I need to make the case I want to make about our society."
In the interest of full disclosure, should not he have told his PBS audience of his public association with this group? Yes, unless you're Bill Moyers.
Then there's another hidden layer. Moyers is more than a public endorser of CMD. He's been a financial supporter, through his other job as the president of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy (formerly the Schumann Foundation). This interview is merely the latest in a long line of Moyers PBS interviews that he hands out like candy to his Schumann grantees -- without disclosing the glaring conflict of interest to the viewers or the taxpayers.
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