VOICES
Political Framing and Prescription Drugs
The political angle cuts out the human dimension
In a far corner of New York State, Rebecca Bennett, a sixty-one-year-old disabled woman, struggles to pay $955 a month for prescription drugs with an income that is half that. In central New York, Gary Schoff, fifty-three, who takes fifteen medications, solves a similar problem by simply not taking some of them. Bennett and Schoff are two of the 13 million Medicare beneficiaries with no prescription coverage, the vast group that was the subject of last summer's fruitless debate over a drug subsidy.
The press covered Congress's failure to help Medicare recipients pay for their drugs. They covered the vacuous sound-bites from politicians, and how much a subsidy would cost the government. But for the most part, they did not cover the issue in ways that would have allowed the public to see why a drug benefit is crucial. The drug story is a human story about people fighting to stay alive, eat, pay their bills, and take advantage of pharmaceutical advances. But the press didn't get it.
What is the job of a journalist these days? To follow the news, or to help lead people to an understanding of some fundamental issue? Judging from 127 stories and editorials about the prescription drug subsidy published over the last six months in eleven daily newspapers, it appears that following has trumped leading.
After reading the stories, I still have no good idea of how the various proposals debated and voted on — and likely to come back in the next Congress — affect the elderly and disabled at the center of the controversy. I was told there is a problem, but have not really been shown what the problem is. I have no idea how different versions of a drug bill would have helped Bennett and Schoff pay for their drugs.
How journalists frame a story is how the public sees it. And the way they framed the drug debate was hardly illuminating, and frankly quite boring. How many self-serving soundbites from politicians does a story need? How many times must a story pontificate on whether passing a bill will help Republicans or Democrats? Stories would have been far more compelling if reporters had followed an old woman around and showed how skipping doses of diabetes medicine raises her blood sugar levels; how paying for a cardiac drug means she can't buy fruits and vegetables for the week.
We tend not to think of ourselves as problem-solvers. But I would add this to our job description: to show people where and why social change is needed. We are constrained by false notions of objectivity, and by competitive pressures to move on. If journalism is to lead the public discourse, we must find ways to shake the we've-done-that-story syndrome. For years after health-care reform died in 1994, the media ignored the issues that prompted the reform movement in the first place. Coverage disappeared; the underlying problems remained.
Not long ago I received an e-mail from a man who had read a column I had written for the Los Angeles Times about elderly people who are on waiting lists for home-delivered meals. "I've never had to be on a waiting list," he said, "and I'm not starving to death. I cannot see the problems that you write about. But, at least you made me look for them and think about the subject." I thought that was the highest compliment a journalist can get.
Reporters must make their audiences think of the Rebecca Bennetts and Gary Schoffs who have to pay for their medicines long after the politicians have gone home, the lobbyists have returned to their suites on K Street, and, yes, after their editors admonish them to move on to a "fresher" story.
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