Bipartisanship! TV Pundits On Both Sides Unhappy With Health Care Summit
The health care summit that framed so much of our weekly news cycle has come and gone, but if the coverage of the event by the major media outlets is any indication, it managed to remind us of the durability of bipartisanship in the media, with pundits on the left and right both sounding off against it: CNN is confused as to the direction Congress will now take, MSNBC’s pundits unhappy with the call for compromise, and news anchor Shepard Smith is tired of Congress wasting his time on talk that leads nowhere.
At CNN, Dana Bash writes a piece for the Political Ticker asking “What’s Next?” The piece reads as if Bash has her arms outstretched in a confused half-shrug, waiting for directions, despite being a series of factual questions. Will Democrats be able to come up with a bill that would drum up Republican support? If they need to use reconciliation, will the bill they draft be eligible for the process (which is only legally able to affect bills involving taxes or the deficit)?
While the journalists at CNN left the event with more questions than answers, the pundits felt their cynicism swell at the idea of such dissonant parties working together. Over at MSNBC, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald sounded off on Morning Joe Today, dissatisfied with the calls for bipartisanship that lead to the summit. “Having the two parties compromise and dilute their positions and pick positions arbitrarily in the middle,” he notes, “for the sake of doing so just to eliminate discord and disharmony and disagreement that’s what strikes me, not only as anti-democratic, but counterproductive,” calling those who demand bipartisanship for its own sake undemocratic. The commentary on Fox News was equally incendiary, with Shepard Smith barely containing his disdain for the entire process almost before the summit was over, calling it “poppycock” and pointing out that the likelihood of any substantive change coming out of the event was low. Outraged, he told South Dakota senator John Thune, “you people up there who are supposed to be representing us are making it perfectly clear you’re gonna sit in your corners with your own talking points and we’re gonna lose. We’re gonna get nothing.” Talking Points Memo compiled the best moments of Smith’s coverage, shown below:
Whether the event was a victory for the President remains to be seen, as there is still time to determine what bill Congress will pass, if any. Ultimately, as much as the health summit was labeled a publicity stunt, the media’s reaction to it shows it did more to make each side more loyal to their cause than to promote public compromise, but the press wasn’t the audience President Obama was trying to court yesterday. If anything, the President got everyone to agree on one thing: the health care summit did little to change anyone’s mind on health care.
