Press not doing its part to debunk health care lies

David Klamann, Las Vegas

Friday, Nov. 12, 2010 | 2:02 a.m.

The press must own up to the large role it played for the misinformation it feeds voters. J. Patrick Coolican’s article in Tuesday’s Las Vegas Sun about our uninformed electorate, “Brains and ballot boxes,” pointed to a poll that said 40 percent of voters believed in the falsehood that the new health care law includes death panels.

So where did those people get this idea? Out of thin air? No, from the screaming headlines of the mainstream media. Sarah Palin and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley constantly repeated the lie of death panels and guess who quoted it without challenging it in their headlines? That’s right, the mainstream media.

If the lies were questioned, and most of the time they weren’t, they were buried deep inside any story, but the headlines are what stuck in people’s minds. Death panels!

I never saw one front-page headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal or Sun during the health care debate that said “Sarah Palin lies about health care!” or “Sen. Charles Grassley lies about death panels.” Those headlines would have been the truth.

Voters are misinformed because the mainstream media do a lousy job of informing them. Yes, I’m tired of ignorant voters, but I’m more tired of the news outlets that make them this way.