Enough he-said, she-said on 'death panels'

I haven't done any coverage of legislation to revise the health care system, so I don't know enough about the various proposals to hold any strong opinion. One thing that is clear to me, however, is that, in general, we've done a poor job of illuminating them.

My colleague Mark Murray reports the numbers in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which indicates that majorities of Americans believe several falsehoods about the plans: among them that they would cover illegal immigrants, that they would use tax dollars to pay for abortions, and that they would allow the government to decide when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

The aggressive protests at town hall meetings don't appear to have swung opinion terribly much: 19 percent said the protests had made them feel less favorable about the plans, but 16 percent said the protests had made them feel more favorable; the 3-point difference is within the poll's reported margin of sampling error.

But what the coverage of the protests has done, it seems to me, is to have squeezed out straighforward explanation of the provisions of the plans themselves.

To be sure, there have been plenty of reports about the policy implications, but my (purely subjective) sense is that the A1 and top-of-the-newscast pieces have focused more on screaming people. Each front-page story about a shouting confrontation takes up space that might have been used for the sober analysis that you'd find if you flipped all the way back to A23.

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time reporting on the role of religion in American society. It took me a while to get comfortable with the idea that just because someone says something, it doesn't have to be reported or balanced by someone who disagrees. Some assertions — like the whole "death panels" thing — are demonstrably false and shouldn't be given more than perfunctory credence, column inches or air time. 

That's not advocacy. That's reporting.

(Disclaimer: While I work for msnbc.com, I do not speak for it in any way, much to its relief.)

Full story (Mark Murray/NBC News)