With respect to the news, we are living in a time of upheaval. I haven’t seen current numbers, but I think far more people get their news from Yahoo than from the New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, etc. Unfortunately, Yahoo News is at least as biased as the more traditional liberal news sources. Today there was a classic example of Yahoo’s misleading news coverage. This is a screen shot of what I saw on Yahoo News this afternoon:
A striking headline, to say the least: “Debate crowd cheers letting uninsured die.” Really? Really? Someone, somewhere, is dumb enough to believe that, but I’m not. So I looked up what really happened. It starts just before the five minute mark in this Ron Paul highlight video–I know, but it was the only place I could readily find that had the exchange in its entirety–when Wolf Blitzer asks Dr. Paul what should happen if a young man chooses not to buy health insurance and then contracts an expensive ailment. Paul began by saying that this is the essence of freedom–the ability to take risks. This answer got a lot of applause, as it should. Blitzer followed up by asking whether “society” should then let the young man die. Yahoo told its uncritical readers that the “debate crowd cheer[ed] the idea of “letting [the] uninsured die.” But that isn’t what the crowd cheered at all:
Paul answered Blitzer’s question “No.” By my count, three people yelled “Yeah” in response to Blitzer’s question, should “society” let the young man die. Paul’s answer was actually good: he said that when he was practicing medicine, the churches took care of indigent patients, and “we never turned anyone away.” That got another round of applause. “Society,” in other words, includes much more than the government.
So what really happened is that the “Tea Party” crowd cheered two things: 1) the proposition that people are entitled to take risks and the government should not be counted on to solve all problems, and 2) churches and other private groups should pay medical bills when an improvident individual can’t. This was transmuted by Yahoo into “Debate crowd cheers letting uninsured die.” This is the sort of ignorant prejudice against which conservatives struggle every day.
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