Left wing media watchdog Media Matters might have thought they scored a major scoop with their revelation of a Fox News memo on avoiding the use of the words public option but as Time magazines Kate Pickert and Slate’s  Jack Shafer point out Fox wasn’t so nefarious after all.

From Time

Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon is under fire today for instructing his newsroom – during the height of the health care debate – not to use the term “public option.” Here’s the supposed smoking gun: an e-mail obtained by Media Matters:

From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:23 AM
To: 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Subject: friendly reminder: let’s not slip back into calling it the “public option”

1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option,” whenever possible.
2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon), use the qualifier “so-called,” as in “the so-called public option.”
3) Here’s another way to phrase it: “The public option, which is the government-run plan.”
4) When newsmakers and sources use the term “public option” in our stories, there’s not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

This amounts to “overt political activism,” according to Media Matters, who noted that two months earlier, Republican pollster Frank Luntz had appeared on Sean Hannity’s show. There, Luntz explained that the only about half of Americans opposed the “public option,” while a large majority opposed a “government option.” Hannity called this “a great point” and agreed to stop using the term “public option.”

Media critic Howard Kurtz picked up the story for a column for the Daily Beast today, in which he reports examples of Sammon’s supposed Republican bias on Fox News. Sammon’s e-mail to Fox journalists was a clear case of Fox News fighting the fight of the Republican Party, right? Well, not so fast.

Here’s what Kurtz and Media Matters fail to note: Most Americans did not understand what the “public option” was. The term, in fact, seemed almost intentionally non-descriptive. Scores of journalists asked me during the health care debate to explain to them what the public option was – and these were folks interested in the news and paying attention to the issue.

The public option would have been a government-run insurance plan some Americans could have purchased. It would have been supported by premiums with no government subsidization and would be been purely voluntary. Like Medicare, the reimbursements paid by the public option would have been set by the government. Also like Medicare, the plan would not have needed to turn a profit, making it cost less than private insurance. It would have therefore provided tough competition for private insurers and pushed down premiums throughout the marketplace.

Even Kurtz doesn’t appear to understand this. In his Daily Beast column, he writes:

The public option—an alternative insurance exchange for those who could not get health coverage from their employers—would in fact have been run by the Health and Human Services Department.

This is not quite right. For starters, an insurance exchange is a marketplace. Under health care reform, exchanges, or web portals, will be built in all 50 states, gathering together all private insurance plans available for purchase and organizing pricing and quality information. Secondly, the public option went through a series of iterations and, under one proposal, would have been available to small businesses and even large employers over time. Lastly, Kurtz doesn’t mention in his definition that the government would not have picked up the tab for the public option. These are crucial details.

Americans did not comprehend them. In August 2009, Nate Silver flagged an AARP-sponsored poll that asked, “When politicians talk about including a “public option” in health care reform, what do you think they mean?” The results:

Creating a government-funded insurance company that competes with existing private insurers to offer health coverage at market rates – 37%

Creating a national health care system like they have in Great Britain – 26%

Creating a network of health care cooperatives – 13%

Don’t know – 23%

The New York Times reported in October 2009:

For example, in a poll that NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released on Tuesday, half the respondents were asked one question about the public option, and half were asked a different one.

Just under 50 percent favored a health care plan administered by the federal government to compete with private insurance companies, while 4 in 10 opposed. But, almost three-fourths said it was important to have a choice between a public plan and a private plan.

Huh?

And Ezra Klein of the Washington Post posted a stark graph on his blog in December 2009, illustrating the fact that two-thirds of Americans said they could not explain the public option.

Given all of this, was it really useful for readers and viewers for reporters to use the term “public option,” which leaves out two very important words – “insurance” and “government”? I think no. In my own reporting, I sometimes just used the term “public option.” One other occasions, I made an effort to add descriptors and qualifiers or say “public plan.”

In retrospect, it’s hard not to wonder if the concept would have survived the legislative process if it had been called the “Medicare option.” Medicare is, after all, widely popular and well understood.

There’s nothing wrong with saying “government-run plan.” That’s what the public option would have been.

And here is what Shafer had to say.

The only times I tune into Fox News Channel are when I accidentally sit on my remote control, when I’m feeling blue and need the amphetamine rush that is Shepard Smith flapping his gums, and when I want to inspect Bill O’Reilly’s show for crimes against civility.

Although I watch Fox News sparingly, I’m glad it arrived to break up the centrist monopoly on news, information, and opinion led by CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. Thanks to Fox News, most of our premises are subject to review—even the language that we use to express our premises. But such deviations from the groupthink line upset the delicate flowers at Media Matters for America, who gave some internal Fox News memos to Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast. In the memos, Bill Sammon, a Fox News vice president and Washington managing editor, instructed his staff on Oct. 27 to use the term government-run health insurance or government option instead of public option when reporting on the political battle over government health care. Sammon also instructed his employees to call the public option the so-called public option.

The call to refer to the program as the government option instead of the public option came from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Media Matters and Kurtz report. But this shouldn’t disqualify the new term from the Fox News stylebook. Government option is superior to public option in that it emphasizes that the government—and thus the taxpayers—will be footing the bill. As a modifier, public has many nongovernmental uses, as in public appearance, public figure, public display, public-key cryptography, public editor, public enemy, public storage, and public opinion.

But when government is used as an adjective, there is no such confusion. Does that make Fox News’ semantic solution superior? I’ve always thought that Social Security should be renamed Government Ponzi Scheme. I’d also like the Export-Import Bank to be renamed the Government Subsidy Depot—but that’s another column.

That Sammon issued a memo directing Fox News reporters to use a phrase he considers more accurate hardly constitutes “spin,” as the headline to Kurtz’s piece has it. If government option is spin, isn’t public option spin, too?

Usage cops walk the beat at every large news organization, commanding reporters to obey the ruling stylebook. For instance, some newspapers used pro-life and pro-choice in their abortion coverage until somebody pointed out that being anti-pro-life wasn’t the same thing as being pro-death—and that pro-choice was closer to meaning pro-abortion, although that gets slippery, too, since you can be against the pro-lifers and not want to have an abortion yourself.

That the Washington managing editor of Fox News disagrees with the journalistic pack on how to cover a story is no crime against journalism. Hell, he should be celebrated as a minor hero and given a balsa-wood and tin plaque to commemorate his independence.

There are reasons to hate Fox News. This isn’t one of them.

The reality is that many people including those in the media didn’t fully understand what the term public option meant and while government option or government run health insurance were seen as less favorable in the polls they were more accurate than using the liberally favored public option terminology.

It’s rare to see one liberal much less two associated with the media to come to the defense of Fox News but I will give credit to Pickert and Shafer for putting partisanship aside in this case and trying to take the spin out of the left’s arguments.

This is a step in the right direction but I don’t expect it to be repeated anytime soon.

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