New York Times FAIL: Gardiner Harris and Reed Abelson
Harris and Abelson quoted three people who they said were critical of the Dartmouth Group--David Cutler, Harlan Krumholz, and Cedars-Sinai Chief Medical Officer Michael Langberg. Of the three, the first two say that Harris and Abelson took them out of context and that the quotes do not reflect their views.
Maggie Mahar has the story:
Health Beat: The New York Times Attacks the Dartmouth Research Part 1: Today, the New York Times published a piece about the Dartmouth research that is raising eyebrows-- in part because there are so many factual mistakes in the story, in part because the tone is so personal. “It sounds as if it were written by someone’s ex-spouse,” a source who is very familiar with Dartmouth’s work told me in a phone conversation earlier today. “Harris and Abelson were determined to write a story that would ‘take down Dartmouth,’” confides a second source in Washington who spoke with the Times reporters. This is the second critical piece that Times’ reporter Gardiner Harris has written about Dartmouth’s highly-respected work in just four months. I wrote about the first story here noting that the article “garbled the facts” about the research, and quoted Dr. Elliott Fisher, the senior researcher, out of context.
Others quoted in today’s story indicate that the Times’ piece distorted what they said: “Every word is clearly accurate, but the implication is wrong,” says David Cutler, a Harvard economist health care policy expert who has advised President Obama on healthcare. Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine and health policy expert at Yale also was quoted.... Today, Krumholz explained:
What I spent most of the interview trying to convey is that a lot of the back and forth [about bits and pieces of Dartmouth’s data ] is inside baseball stuff – and we are all working hard to figure out how to gauge costs and value better. But Dartmouth’s work on variation is pivotal to moving us forward – and we all agree that there is lots of waste and it is unevenly distributed across the country.
After reading the Times' piece, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum was baffled:
Bottom line: all the "data adjustments" the Times reporters talk about have, in fact, been done. Researchers at Dartmouth and elsewhere have controlled for price levels, for demographics, and for differing rates of sickness, and their results largely hold up.... In the end, then, the authors of the Times piece end up with almost nothing. By the time their piece is done, they've basically only got two things left. First, the Dartmouth researchers admit that, on occasion, they might discuss their findings more broadly than they should when they're talking to a lay audience. Second, there are individual bits and pieces of their dataset that other researchers have disputed. Just as there are with any large, complex dataset. In other words, there's no there there. The Dartmouth research is not the be-all-end-all of healthcare research, but its basic conclusions are extremely robust and have been confirmed over and over. Why the Times chose to pretend otherwise is a mystery...
All wonky health care stuff, but right-wing blogs and even the Republican Congressional Caucus was quoting this sloppy work by the Times as proof that health care costs will not be brought down by reform. Yes there will be a spike in 2012, but in the following years health care reform will bring down costs.
Fox News No Longer BFF's With Breitbart?
Eric Boehlert noted today that Fox News seems to be making a concerted effort to ignore Andrew Breitbart's latest "investigation," this time into the U.S. Census. It's hard to say if this is part of the explosive revelations he threatened to unleash during the 2010 election cycle if the Obama administration didn't open an investigation into ACORN (which it has not done) or part of his "takedown" of the "institutional left" which was supposed to have been accomplished by mid-March. Whatever it's supposed to be, Fox News has been uncharacteristically not covering it.James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart don't care about the truth - they care about feeding lies to their ignorant followers and making money off those lies. Propaganda has made many a right-wing extremist pundit wealthy and that is all that seems to matter.
As Boehlert suggests, the complete discrediting of the ACORN videos, along with questions about the videographers are likely factors. So, too, were Breitbart's efforts to cover up the videos' shortcomings to Fox News viewers - if not to Fox News, itself.
For example, when Team Breitbart trumpeted their video supposedly revealing one ACORN employee confessing to having murdered her husband, Breitbart and videographer Hannah Giles stonewalled about whether anyone had vertified whether it was true. In fact, the claim was proven to be a hoax played on the video makers.
Similarly, Giles falsely told Hannity, with cover from Breitbart, that nobody at any of the ACORN offices had refused to help her with her proposed illegal scheme.
