MediaWatch: July 1994

Janet Cooke Award: Liberal Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pays for Pro-Clinton Health Care Special

NBC Takes the Money and Runs...Left

NBC raised a lot of eyebrows by accepting $3.5 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its two-hour, commercial-free June 21 health care special, To Your Health. Five foundation fellows served on Hillary Clinton's secret task force, and when that secrecy became an issue, the foundation spent $500,000 for four town meetings featuring the First Lady.

In 1991, foundation president Dr. Steven Schroeder told The Chronicle of Philanthropy: "We are very conscious that fundamental change [in health] is not going to happen without government...Many of our recent grants have been predicated on the idea that we would get government involved."

On CNBC's Tim Russert May 9, Tom Brokaw said: "I can assure you that I wouldn't be involved with that program in any fashion if it were being directed or if it were being engineered by a special interest group."

Several conservatives (including MediaWatch publisher L. Brent Bozell) wrote to NBC President Robert Wright charging the grant "constitutes an appearance of partisanship." In a phone conversation, David Bohrman, the show's Executive Producer, gave Bozell his word the show would be balanced and pursue all aspects of the debate. But NBC earned the Janet Cooke Award.

The special, a series of pre-taped segments followed by discussions with on-stage panels and an audience at Washington's Warner Theater, tilted in favor of pro-government spokesmen and failed to explore conservative policy options. Hillary Clinton was the sole guest for the first half-hour, referring to NBC's anecdotes as proof of the need for the Clinton plan. On-stage panelists leaned two-to-one in favor of the Clinton plan or single-payer. Speakers from the audience also leaned to the liberal side by two to one.

Bohrman told MediaWatch: "We went back and timed out everything in the broadcast. No matter how you add it up or take a look at it, it was very well-balanced." But when MediaWatch suggested the ratio was more like 2 to 1, Bohrman changed his spin: "Whenever any two people try to add it up, you get a different number...What adds to the perception may have been that there was such a large dose of Tom and Mrs. Clinton at the beginning."

The program's pre-packaged news features were mostly horror stories: uninsured parents of kids with dramatic medical problems, or a woman who couldn't fund home care for her mother. Those sufferers were brought into the theater to demand more government. Reporter Maria Shriver added to one victim's demand: "And you want it now!"

Shriver began her series of segments by declaring: "There are at any one time during the year as many as 58 million Americans who have no insurance." Cato Institute analyst Michael Tanner, one of the conservatives who spoke during the NBC show, told MediaWatch: "Shriver misstated that. According to the numbers everyone uses from the Employee Benefits Research Institute, the figure is 58 million at some time during the year, but 37 million at any one time. Of those 37 million, half of those go uninsured for four months or less; 70 percent for less than a year. The number who are uninsured and uninsurable is about one percent."

Later, Shriver presented a emotional profile of a dying man whose insurance company refused to pay for his cancer treatment because he had a pre-existing condition. But she then explained this victim filed a claim for cancer treatment just 15 days after he bought his insurance. Placing no blame on the man's failure to plan ahead, Shriver declared: "There are few safety nets for Alan and an estimated 81 million Americans under the age of 65 who suffer from illnesses that were diagnosed before their medical insurance went into effect."

Both the 58 million and 81 million estimates were used in Bill Clinton's 1994 State of the Union. On January 26, CNN's Jeanne Meserve monitored the President's speech for accuracy: "It's true that 58 million are without insurance for some part of the year, but often only for a few weeks as they switch jobs. The number of hardcore uninsured is much smaller. As for the claim that 81 million Americans have pre-existing conditions, impartial experts say they have never seen such a number and that it defies logic." But Bohrman told MediaWatch: "We feel very comfortable with the numbers."

Instead of exploring deregulation or medical savings accounts, which Tanner notes is in "at least 16 bills before Congress, with nearly 200 co-sponsors," NBC portrayed radio talk show hosts as rude partisan obstacles to a constructive solution. "It can get personal and it can get rough," said reporter Brian Williams. "Health care is what America is talking about up and down the AM dial. It's where to go for the thunder on the right...If most of the talk seems negative, that's because it is."

But a 1993 poll by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press contradicted the media stereotype: talk radio hosts preferred Clinton in 1992, 38 percent to 23 percent for Bush and 18 percent for Perot.

Williams spotlighted ideology: "They don't get any more conservative than Michael Reagan, son of the former President....conservative talk show hosts attract conservative listeners, many of them retirees and well-off financially." None of the left-wing spokesmen were labeled as "liberal" or "socialist," including Williams' story on single-payer activists in California.

NBC focused on the beneficiaries of insurance, not the payers. In one segment, reporter Brian Williams found one mother who repeatedly brings her child into emergency rooms: "She never sees a bill and she likes the convenience." NBC didn't ask: is she a victim, or the problem? Could our problem be most Americans don't pay for their care, so they don't have any incentive to economize?

But while Godfather's Pizza executive Herman Cain was challenged repeatedly to defend his failure to accept employer mandates, Brokaw did not follow up with Hillary Clinton or anyone else on other elements of the Clinton plan, such as community rating or price controls. Williams found mountains of paperwork erupt "largely because government and insurance company regulations designed to save money for patient care require a bureaucracy so large they end up costing more than they could ever save," but Mrs. Clinton was not asked how further government regulation would fix that. No horror stories focused on socialized systems such as Canada.

By show's end, a Kansas businesswoman who worried about the employer mandate at the start had come around: "I think there is a way to do it, but it's going to take everybody working together." Brokaw asked: "Will it take people not simply working together, but spending a little more of what they have?" The woman replied: Yes." The crowd applauded.

NBC repeatedly declared that the Johnson Foundation had no contact with the producers, but the foundation must have liked what it paid for: USA Today reported June 30 that it's "very interested in sponsoring another prime-time network special on health care." But for all of the money the foundation spent and all the time the network devoted to create an informative, balanced exploration of a complicated issue, NBC blew it.

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