Yesterday HuffPost's Eyes and Ears team wrapped up a 10-day examination of reporting on the topic of health care, a project in partnership with NewsTrust. For a full breakdown of our findings, check out NewsTrust's blog.
The Eyes & Ears community (which you can join here) looked at 146 health care stories, 51 of which received a NewsTrust rating--meaning three or more people rated the story.
The following stories received the highest ratings for importance and accuracy:
- In Netherlands, Insurers Compete Over Quality of Care - NewsHour / PBS (video)
- Going Out of Business? - FactCheck (News Analysis) A Texas-Sized Health Care Failure - New York Times (Opinion) (see reviews)
- The Lie Machine - Rolling Stone (Special Report)
I personally recommend the This American Life segment. I'll be tuning in on Sunday for the second half of the two-part series.
The Health Care News Hunt also surfaced a number of articles that set the record straight on somewhat popular misinformation campaigns. The most under reported of these was a 60-second add released by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity.
Among other things, the ad claims that Medicare will go bankrupt in eight years, using this "fact" as an argument against paying for health care reform "with $500 billion in Medicare spending cuts." There is no evidence that Medicare will go bankrupt and Congress has never proposed legislation that would cut Medicare by $500 billion. FactCheck.org does a great job of breaking apart the ad's many false arguments and proving them patently false. It's worth a read.
And of course, there was yesterday's breaking news coverage of the Senate finance Committee's vote on the health care bill where Republican Senator Olympia Snowe broke with her party to vote alongside 13 Democrats.
It might be insider baseball, but the split in reporting on how Democrats secured Snowe's vote shows the extent to which the healthcare reform battle has gone on behind closed doors. You can read the full report on how different outlets covered the vote and the week's entire findings here.
Thank you to everyone from Eyes & Ears who participated and to our partners at NewsTrust, Executive Director Fabrice Florin and editors Derek Hawkins and Kazar Compwala.