To further prove my point, here`s a report about how media (Canadian in this case) downright lie in their opinion articles. And it is not one or two articles, but almost every single medium out there. This case is about health care, but it applies on social security themes as well.
The Media`s Private Health Care Scare
A SPECIAL CANSTATS REPORT, JULY 30, 2002
COMPARING clinical outcomes of private versus public health-care delivery has received scant public attention in Canada. Most of the debate has concentrated on public medicine’s relative economic performance, cost-containment strategies, and administration. But when a study appeared in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on May 28, 2002 purportedly “the first of its kind” to contrast risk-adjusted mortality rates in private for-profit and private non-profit hospitals across a vast patient population, journalists jumped on the story.
What follows is a retrospective analysis of how the media covered this influential study.
That the implications of this study were so badly misunderstood and exaggerated by the media should put Canadian journalists, policy makers, and the general public on guard. As this case study demonstrates, the limitations on a study’s significance to a major public policy issue like health-care reform, even if those limitations are admitted in the journal article itself, can be elided or ignored altogether in subsequent media coverage.