PBS ombudsman: Ignoring single payer was a mistake
Single-Minded About Single-Payer: The Ombudsman Column
By Michael Getler
PBS, April 23, 2010PBS's venerable public affairs and investigative series Frontline is, I confess, a favorite of mine, and has been for as long as I can remember watching public television.
That doesn't mean that at times it doesn't stumble, or produce something that draws questioning and substantive criticism from viewers. Indeed, Frontline has been the subject of several ombudsman columns over the years. Yet one of the distinguishing things about Frontline from where I sit is that many of those who write at times to express disagreement frequently do so by also saying, first, how much they respect the program. In other words, even when it is bad, in their view, it's still good.
At least some of that ambivalence was in evidence this week when our office was deluged with almost a thousand critical e-mails from people who said they were upset and angry that an hour-long look back at how the White House ultimately hammered out a historic agreement on health care, aptly titled "Obama's Deal," failed to deal with the single-payer system advocated by many of those who were not part of the deal.
Many of these e-mails appeared to have been generated in response to a handful of websites that criticized the program for what they saw as failures to deal fairly or adequately with this single-payer option and with one of its major proponents, Dr. Margaret Flowers. She is an activist member of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), who also appeared in the film, and was interviewed briefly on camera.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/april/pbs-ombudsman-ignoring-single-payer-was-a-mistake