Opponents of the Obama administration’s health plan are posting online articles that claim to present details of the health plan. But the government’s concerns about the public’s inability to discern the inaccuracies in the postings may be overblown, writes one law student. -DB
SuffolkMediaLaw.com
Media and Communications Law Society
Commentary
August 4, 2009
By Denise Ouellet
Although the Obama Administration has advocated for a transparent government by encouraging public officials to blog and tweet and by bringing the White House up to speed with new media technologies, these same communication tools are creating confusion as to which are legitimate. Since anyone can make a Facebook or Twitter account or pen a blog, anyone could pretend to disseminate “official” information and muddy the messages intended to come from the Administration.
This has been the case with opponents of Obama’s healthcare reforms. They have been actively publishing articles and posts online that claim to reveal the details of the reform plan, yet are inaccurate. As this ABC article points out, the opponents take comments and phrases out of context and cause panic among some audiences scared of losing their health insurance at the flip of a switch.
To counteract the confusion, the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform (who knew that was an actual job title?), released an online video on Tuesday providing “official information” from the White House on the president’s plan.
I wonder if this is really a problem for America, or one the government made up to portray its version of healthcare reform more favorably. Is it really difficult to discern which sites and stories are from reliable sources and which are not? In the early days of the Internet, it was easier to tell the sophisticated sites from the ones that were haphazardly thrown together, which provided some guidance as to which were more likely to be reliable.
Having grown up doing research and writing papers from an encyclopedia, my teachers warned me of the dangers of relying on online sites and guided our transition to digital resources. However, now we have whole generations that never had to make that transition; they’ve probably done most of their research online from the beginning. So how will they be able to tell what is real and what is not real?
As concerning as it might seem, I doubt it will cause too much trouble. This generation is likely the savviest yet in terms of navigating the digital world. I hope they would be able to figure out that a YouTube video put together by “NakedEmperorNews1” is probably not a legitimate source from which to learn about healthcare reform. I give Americans more credit than that. I suspect that this is just another excuse to drum up the Republican v. Democrat healthcare reform debate and an attempt to discredit Republican analysis of the reforms (legitimate free speech). I wish the government would give us a little more credit too.
At the end of the day, they’ve done nothing more than put another online video into cyberspace that claims to be legitimate. That does nothing to help us sift through all the messages. However, as I said before, I think we’ll manage to figure it out on our own.
We’re naturally skeptical and critical of the news we take in because we take in so much of it and it’s so easy to cross-reference a “fact.” We’ve come a long way from the “War of the Worlds” mishap when radio listeners mistakenly took the reading of a story as a real news account that aliens were invading the country. We survived our mother’s warnings saying, “don’t believe everything you see on TV” without a government official in our living room affirming the “official” news for us. If history does repeat, I’m sure the American citizens will survive yet another transition to receiving news through a new medium.
Copyright 2009 Media and Communications Law Society, Suffolk University Law School