Media Regurgitates Healthcare Propaganda from Left-Wing Think Tank

Sound ridiculous? It is. But this job does exist. It's called "the modern journalist."

The Commonwealth Fund recently released a "study" that claims that the U.S. ranks last in the world in the area of healthcare. The "study" is a repeat from this group of a series of reports on healthcare which are rife with methodological problems.

Erroneous methodology aside, what is of more concern are the dozens of panic-inducing headlines that resulted from The Commonwealth Fund's press release. A notable example would be Reuters' "US scores dead last in healthcare study." One has to admire the clever use of the word "dead" accompanied by a sad photo of an apparently abandoned patient in a hallway. Whoa! This sounds and looks BAD.

However, nowhere in the article do the TWO journalists (Sandra Maler and Cynthia Osterman- who apparently has a history of problems) mention anything about The Commonwealth Fund and its history of political advocacy. They are simply called "a nonprofit fund." Hmmmm - like The Heritage Foundation and The Cato Institute are "nonprofit funds"? I can guarantee you that an appropriate adjective - like "conservative" or "right-leaning" - is almost always attached to those two organizations when they appear in the news.

And by no means is this incident an outlier. In virtually all publications and postings by major media (NPR, LA Times etc.) regarding this "study" is ANY implication made that The Commonwealth Fund has a political agenda or point of view.

Fortunately, some in the alternative media jumped on this problem immediately. Dennis Prager calls out the media mynah birds and Michelle Malkin reveals an interesting arrangement between The Commonwealth Fund and the media.

John Stossel just does a journalistic facepalm . He's been ripping this same study to shreds year after year.

It literally takes only a few minutes of online research to figure out how The Commonwealth Fund manipulated numbers and language ("infant mortality" vs. "live infant birth" etc.) in clever and convoluted ways to get the results they wanted. Seems like something a journalist should be doing.

But that would be letting the facts get in the way of a good story.