health care reform

Entries Tagged as 'health care reform'

An Excellent Start, But Not Perfect

May 8th, 2017 · 2 Comments · health care reform, journalism

By Arthur Alpert How does the world change? Are the efforts of extraordinary individuals required or do powerful forces come into play? It’s an eternal argument I don’t pretend to answer. At the Albuquerque Journal, however, it sure looks as if replacing one miscreant has turned the daily from a political tool into a newspaper. […]

The Rules for Covering Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid: Bad news gets page one, good news gets buried, and Big Pharma gets ignored entirely

November 23rd, 2015 · No Comments · health care reform, journalism

By Arthur Alpert “Premiums to rise for Medicare drug plan” was the headline Journal editors ran over an Associated Press story they front-paged today, Monday, Nov. 23. Of course, they ran it on the front page. There must be a rule at the Journal – anything negative, even potentially negative about Obamacare, Medicare or Medicaid […]

Falsifying The News

October 16th, 2015 · 3 Comments · health care reform, journalism

By Arthur Alpert Gosh, I’ve been Albuquerque Journal watching on and off for five years now. Just checked. Seems I started in January, 2010.That’s surprising. So is my initial naïveté. I anticipated I would criticize both the political bias seeping into the news pages and the daily’s amateur, incompetent journalism. As it turns out, and […]

Daily Politicization of the News

September 18th, 2015 · 2 Comments · climate change, economy, financial coverage, health care reform, journalism, Koch brothers, role of government

By Arthur Alpert The Albuquerque Journal’s daily politicization of news isn’t always dramatic. The editors don’t slip political material into Associated Press stories every day. Nor do they edit those AP accounts to remove “objectionable” content every day. Sometimes Journal commissars are content to employ relatively pedestrian tools. Today, for example, Friday, Sept. 18, there’s […]

Tools of Misapprehension

July 30th, 2015 · No Comments · health care reform, journalism, role of government, social safety net, war and peace

By Arthur Alpert That the Albuquerque Journal makes most news decisions politically is so obvious it’s become (borderline) boring. Yet the skill with which the editors wield their tools to produce the paper’s daily misapprehension of reality still fascinates me, as does the relentlessness of the effort. By tools, I mean headlines, where stories run, […]

Unsourced and Misleading: Who wrote mystery paragraph inserted into wire service Obamacare story?

June 11th, 2015 · 2 Comments · Fact Check, health care reform, journalism, Koch brothers, Uncategorized

By Arthur Alpert Recently, I amused you (I hope) with a post on how the Albuquerque Journal has trained me, as Pavlov did his dogs, to rush to the computer whenever it publishes an Op Ed essay from a group named “Freedom” – something. Salivating, I turn from breakfast to Google for my reward – […]

The Stories That Cannot Exist

January 17th, 2015 · 1 Comment · campaign finance reform, Congress, economy, financial coverage, health care reform, journalism, regulation

By Arthur Alpert All hail Nick Estes’ Op Ed column in the January 9 issue of the Albuquerque Journal. We won’t see its like for a long time. Under the rubric, “Yes, we DO know how to fix the economy”, Estes took syndicated columnist Robert Samuelson to task for writing the reverse. Estes explained: “The […]

Old-fashioned Virtues, Anti-Journalism and Net Neutrality

November 16th, 2014 · 3 Comments · health care reform, journalism, net neutrality, Uncategorized

By Arthur Alpert I wanted today to evaluate the Albuquerque Journal’s political coverage leading up to Nov. 4 – hint, it ranged downward from mediocre – and I will get to it soon. But columns by Winthrop Quigley and D’Val Westphal intervened, reminding me of an old suggestion by my colleague, Denise Tessier and, well, […]

“Plutocrats Against Democracy”: The news deemed not fit to print by the Journal

October 29th, 2014 · 2 Comments · climate change, economy, health care reform, journalism

By Arthur Alpert I had no idea Paul Krugman read the Albuquerque Journal, did you? Hard to believe, I know, but his Oct. 23 NY Times column contains big hints that he follows our local daily closely. It’s headlined, “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. Krugman argues first that plutocrats (that is, persons whose power derives from their […]

More Journalistic Offenses of Commission and Omission

September 17th, 2014 · No Comments · economy, financial coverage, health care reform, inequality, journalism, polling

By Arthur Alpert Some days this gig is frustrating. No, that’s incorrect; it’s frustrating most days because I cannot decide if I should alert you to Albuquerque Journal management’s daily journalistic offenses of commission or its offenses of omission. Should I say the headline on Winthrop Quigley’s Sept. 14 UpFront column on commercial insurance rates […]