The Lie Factory: How politics became a business

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/24/120924fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

by mceachen • 14 years ago

85 15 14 years ago

jkubicek• 14 years ago

That's an amazing article but the corollaries to the current opposition to US health care reform seems a little too neat. Wikipedia is sparse on the subject, has anyone seen any other sources of info on Campaigns, Inc?

mibbitier• 14 years ago

The article does seem particularly biased to me. Sort of ironic.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

It's the New Yorker; of course it's biased. They're openly, historically left-leaning.

That doesn't preclude it from being a great read.

chubbard• 14 years ago

It's an article about a socialist democrat from a liberal leaning publication and how a smear campaign of EPIC proportions was created to thwart his chances. Weird Right!? </puns> How did Fox news miss this one too?! </sarcasm>

ktizo2• 14 years ago

Here's a paper from the University of Virginia in 2009 that corroborates the article and goes into more detail - https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:pZStLTKZbWgJ:...

There follows an excerpt from it to give you the gist -

"The strategy adopted by the AMA would be professional to the core. The center of gravity for decision making was altered significantly, and the “mom and pop” feel of past Association decisions was eliminated. This was done in two ways. First, a San Francisco public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter, was hired to coordinate the anti- health insurance initiative.

As a result, a proactive “National Education Campaign” was designed to make the AMA’s case against the Ewing Report and subsequent national health insurance legislation in Congress At its core, the National Education Campaign would focus on connecting “national health insurance” with “socialized medicine” in the public’s mind.

Second, Morris Fishbein, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was removed. Fishbein had been an important voice within the AMA for three decades; he was, however, a reactionary thinker, and his public methods lacked the precision and flair of the new Whitaker/Baxter proposal.

To promote their National Education Campaign, Whitaker and Baxter first went about assembling a war chest. The internal legislative body of the AMA, the House of Delegates, voted in December 1948 to assess each member $25, for the purpose of raising $3.5 million – money that would support the Campaign’s goals.

Within two months, Baxter and Whitaker had sufficient resources (around $1.5 million) to begin implementing their strategic plans, which included “distributing millions of pamphlets, making wide use of the press and radio, mobilizing additional pressure groups against government health insurance, writing letters to congressmen, and organizing speakers’ bureaus throughout the country.”

In addition, the AMA would use physicians themselves as assets; while waiting for their family doctors, patients would be exposed to pamphlets – one of which was titled “The Voluntary Way is the American Way” – that detailed the dangers of compulsory health insurance."

witoldc• 14 years ago

The bigger the government influence/regulation/power/money the higher the stakes and more well funded stakeholders trying to influence it.

bluedanieru2• 14 years ago

So we should do away with all regulation then? That way there's nothing left for the powerful to co-opt? (I'm sure that there's nothing left to stop them either is inconsequential, as the marketplace or something will just magically save us from that, I mean if you don't like working for 40 years and then being left for dead you can always get another job. Anyway we can sort out the details later, uh, after the election.)

This is rubbish. Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine. Maybe you're right though, maybe the fact that the US is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth and that its citizens are remarkably comfortable with this fact, means they can't do health care. That's got nothing to do with the concept of nationalized health care and definitely not with regulation in general, but is rather a consequence of an irresponsible citizenry and their terrible social organization.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

Even countries with irresponsible citizenry and terrible social organization often manage some form of nationalised healthcare though, so that can't be it. I'm betting on it just being a side effect of making bribery, sorry, lobbyists donating to campaign finance, a respectable part of the political process.

crusso• 14 years ago

So we should do away with all regulation then?

Straw man/false dilemma.

Being cognizant of the danger of unnecessary concentrations of power in our society does not mean that there's no reason to concentrate power.

It means having a healthy understanding of the side-effects of that concentration of power and gives yet another reason to keep government's focus on the narrow side.

Plenty of nations (i.e. all first world nations) have implemented national schemes of some sort, and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine.

Broad generalizations. Actually, many first world nations have had huge problems with their national schemes from poor medical services and poor availability of actual treatment to larger economic issues resulting from overspending on social programs like health care.

The bottom line for me is that the health care law passed is a huge and complicated power grab of a mess that did nothing to address the main issues that needed to be addressed: Reduction of the middlemen and price-hiding tactics standing between healthcare providers and consumers. The government had a real opportunity to cut the ties between place-of-work and healthcare. They had a real opportunity to give consumers the tools and rights they needed so that they could be informed purchasers of healthcare services.

pc862• 14 years ago

Why are people like you incapable of having a debate about something on its merits, instead relying on straw man arguments and attacks?

> So we should do away with all regulation then?

The parent didn't say that and nobody outside of the former Paul campaign has ever suggested. This is exactly what I'm talking about.

> Anyway we can sort out the details ... after the election

Stop using month-old Democratic talking points for your arguments and maybe people would take you more seriously.

> Plenty of nations ... have implemented national schemes ... and none of them suffer from the stuff that you read about coming from the right's bullshit machine.

So there it is, the right's "bullshit machine" as you put it. Let's ignore the fact that the US is several times the size of any western European country, much less homogenous and with a greater income disparity even between the 2nd and 4th quintiles. But yes, because it works for 62 million Britons, clearly if someone doesn't think it will work for 312 million Americans they (a) are racist; (b) are stupid; (c) hate poor people; (d) all of the above.

taliesinb• 14 years ago

Great read, but it's odd the article didn't mention Edward Bernays, the originator of public relations (and nephew of Freud). Bernays preferred the term 'propaganda', but after he discovered Goebbels had used his book "Crystalizing Public Opinion" to steer German public opinion towards consent of the holocaust, he stopped using the name.

He also invented advertising as we now know it. Before Bernays it was "Brand X doesn't wear out", after it was "Brand X: the man's choice". Among his works are "The Business of Propoganda" and "Engineering of Consent" (hmm... that sounds familiar).

Bernays is only on my intellectual radar because of this mesmerizing Adam Curtis documentary: http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/

The Lie Factory: How politics became a business

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