Welcome back, Potter

Former CIGNA Oberführer Wendell Potter, who to his eternal credit "finally came to question the ethics of what I had done and been a part of for nearly two decades" and left his lucrative health care-denial job to join the truth heroes at the Center for Media and Democracy, offers a timely overview of the ways his former industry has prevented any unprofitable changes to the U.S. health care system over the years.  An excerpt:

[T]he insurers formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of Rights. While it was billed as a broad-based business coalition that was led by the National Federation of Independent Business and included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion’s share of its funding and guidance from the big insurance companies and their trade associations. [...]

One of the key strategies of the Health Benefits Coalition as it was gearing up for battle in late 1998 was to stir up support among conservative talk radio and other media. Among the tactics the PR firm implemented for the Coalition was to form alliances with important conservative groups, such as the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, to get them to send letters to Congress or appear at HBC press conferences. The Health Benefits Coalition also launched an advertising campaign in conservative media outlets. The message was that President Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of the “Democrat” Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on health care that he failed to get in 1994. The tactics worked. Industry allies in Congress made sure the Patients’ Bill of Rights would not become law.

And the conclusion, which makes an important point:

During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of PR people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this country. And that ratio of PR people to reporters will continue to grow. The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich corporations and other special interests. The losers are average Americans, most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol Hill.

There are many reasons for the media's awfulness, but one of them is just the fact that reporters swim in an ocean of PR.  And as media corporations have cut staff over the years there's only been a greater motivation for those who remain to take the shortcuts they can—and the PR industry is right there to fill the gap.  Which is just one of the many ways that the pursuit of corporate profits makes it easier for CIGNA, Pfizer, and their cohorts to plant their lies in our heads.

By all means, read the rest—and you may also want to follow Potter's blog.

[ Previous Pottery here. ]

Comments

[Bjorn]

Never mind that the holy Journalists have proven themselves totally untrustworthy as well.

[John Caruso]

Yes, their suckitude has many causes—like the exquisite level of indoctrination Robin Wright exhibited after the Clinton administration's Iraq town hall in 1998 (which I mentioned a few days ago). In this case I'm just pointing that there are some boringly practical reasons for it as well. It's easy to forget that reporters are just people with jobs, and so they naturally do what any people with jobs do when they're expected to produce the same level of output with fewer resources.

[SteveB]

Agreed, but I get some hope from the possibility that Americans might to be gaining resistance to the ocean of PR we all swim in. Two recent polls, for example, show majority support for single-payer, and majority opposition to the war in Afghanistan. That's remarkable, when you consider that there has probably never been a single person allowed on TV to argue for single-payer or against the war in Afghanistan. How did that happen? How did millions of Americans get an idea in their heads that wasn't put there by the PR machine?