Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1315; Trudy Lieberman and Marcia Angell; Rage on the Airwaves

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, from the front lines of the health care battle, some expert reporting on winners and losers. We have a system that, through and through, and both the payment system and the delivery system is oriented toward profits. We need to have more clarity on how all this is going to affect the ordinary person on Main Street, and that has not been done. And some straight talk about hate talk. A man came in here who totally dehumanized us. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human? Stay tuned.

Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Paulie Gut Charitable Fund, Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Maryland and Bob Clemens and the Clemens Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement products and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyer's. Welcome to the journal. Push finally came to shove in Washington this week, as the battle over health care reform escalated from scattered sniper fire into all our combat. Socialized medicine produces rationing of care.

One of the plans that we've talked about is a public option, pushing health care reform by August. $239 billion to the deficit by 2019. We're talking about a nightmare for the American people. It's not going to add to the deficit. It will not add to the deficit. It is insane. If this all seems to be getting more and more confusing, we'll join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke. The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bomb sites. They want to loss for Obama, so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore Republican control of Congress after next year's elections. In the words of Republican Senator Jim Dement, if we were able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break in. The Waterloo of Dement's metaphor, of course, was the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte's rule as Emperor of France, a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon and Emperor who must be stopped.

I mean, this guy is practically an imperial president now. When he starts to lose and people question him and push him back against the wall, he's not going to know how to react. The Republican strategy is almost identical to the way they turned health care into Waterloo for Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993. Find more you like in the president's plan? Yeah. And? Well, I just doesn't have the choice we want. Look at this. Back then, one of their chief propagandists William Crystal urged his party to block any health care plan for fear Democrats would be seen as, quote, the generous protector of middle-class interests. Now, he's telling the GOP, go for the kill, throw the kitchen sink at it, drive a state through its heart. We need to start over. So in lockstep are the Republicans that would strategist Alex Castelano. It should a memo on the battle plan party chairman Michael Steele echoed it word-for-word in the speech at Washington's National Press Club. Castelano, slow down, Mr. President.

We can't afford to get health care wrong. Slow down, Mr. President. We can't afford to get health care wrong. Castelano, the old top-down Washington-centered system that Democrats propose will empower Washington to restrict the curers and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you. The old top-down Washington-centered system that Democrats propose is designed to grow Washington's power to restrict the curers and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you. Castelano, President Obama is experimenting with America too much, too soon, and too fast. Your experiment promotes, proposes too much, too soon, too fast. As the Republicans fired away, big business stepped up the attack too. They're lobbying and advertising guns blazing. In certain key states, where members of Congress remain on the fence, the airwaves are vibrating with television commercials aimed at shifting hearts and minds away from any change that might threaten profits. What will happen to your family health care

if Washington runs it? Now Washington wants to bring Canadian-style health care to the U.S. President Obama rejected the Republican's Waterloo metaphor but mounted a massive media counteroffensive of his own. Another Republican senator that defeating health care reform is about breaking me. So let me be clear. This isn't about me. I have great health insurance. And so does every member of Congress. This debate is about the letters I read when I sit in the Oval Office every day. And the stories I hear at town hall meetings. I'm the President. And I think this has to get done. But the President's already stepped on booby traps of his own making and mine feels laid by his own party, especially when the Congressional Budget Office reported that his reforms, instead of controlling costs, would send the national debt further into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly through the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray. They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill

any bill passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interest that it will be less Waterloo than Waterdown, a steady diluting of what they'd hoped for or America needs. The big drug companies are already so pleased with what they've been promised that they brought back Harry and Louise. They believe TV couple who help take down the Clinton health care plan. Because every day, more and more people are finding they can't afford health care. But this time, they're in favor of reform. Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier because this time, they're in on the deal? What to make of all this? I've asked two expert analysts of health care to help me out. Trudy Lieberman covers health care reform for the Columbia Journalism Review and directs the health and medicine reporting program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. Marsha Angel, a physician herself, is senior lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University Medical School.

She was the first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She, too, has written widely and often about health care reform. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. So Trudy Lieberman, is it Waterloo or no Waterloo? Isn't that the question? Waterloo for home. Whether it's a Waterloo for the American people who aren't going to or may not get a resolution of this and they certainly do need some help along the way with health care, or is it a political question for the president? Well, the Republicans have made it this week clearly and sharply a political challenge to him. I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens. A lot of people have said this is a do-or-die issue for the president. That's certainly, that rhetoric certainly hadn't been coming up really before the last several weeks. And I would say on the politics first that it is something of a Waterloo in the sense that if he doesn't get it right, he's going to be president for three more years and the chickens will come home to roost. So, well, the failure can show up before he's out the door

and then he's got a real problem. He was right in his press conference when he talked about cost as a central issue. And he said, if we don't control costs, not only will the health system continue to disintegrate but it will drag the whole economy down with it. What he has essentially advocated is throwing more money into the current system. He's treating the symptom and he's not treating the underlying cause, cause of our problem. Our problem is that we spend two and a half times as much per person on health care as other advanced countries, the average of other advanced countries, and we don't get our money's worth. So now he says, okay, this is a terribly inefficient, wasteful system, let's throw some money into it. Into the same system? Into the same system. That's his problem.

The other problem in the press conference was that he was trying to mobilize public support for a bill and we don't know what that bill is. I want to get to that point because he's been vague right from the very beginning on this point. We have not known exactly what the Obama health plan has been, even though the headline writers and the press has been talking about his health care overhaul for months. And so I like to step back and say, well, what exactly is he talking about? What exactly does he mean? And he has not been clear on that. You've said he's been AWOL, AWOL details. He has been out to lunch on this. And I think that's a deliberate strategy on the part of the White House. Yes. What they had done is learn from what they call the Clinton mistakes in 93, 94. And what happened then is that Hillary came out with this big 1,000-page bill, although we have another 1,000-page bill, and left the special interest groups sort of pick it apart. This time, they decided not to do that, that they would be deliberately vague about this,

and stay as vague as they could be until push came to shove. And so basically, it's my belief that this whole discussion about health care reform is flying over the heads of the American people. They know about reform, but they don't know, they know the words reform, but they don't know what they meant at all. I had the same reaction you did to that press conference. And I woke up with a Thursday morning after the press conference to the headline in the New York Times that read, President seeks public support on health care. And in the margin of the times, I said, does the public know what is in this house? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Well, somebody has to know. They keep talking about it. Well, he says, like Congress do it. In their wisdom, they'll come out with something. And I will give you a few feel-good principles. And then we'll wait and see what happens because he doesn't want his fingerprints on it if it fails. I feel the American people need to know what is in that bill. And what's in the bill is an individual mandate that is going to require all Americans

with a few exceptions to carry health insurance. And that means if you do not get insurance from Medicare or Medicaid or your employer, you're going to have to go out and buy health insurance. And that is a lot of money for most people because most of them would buy it now if they could afford it. About 85 percent of the uninsured require subsidies because they can afford it. And I think this is going to come up as a big surprise to people to realize they're going to have to buy insurance from private insurance companies or face a tax penalty. Well, that goes to the cause of the problem. We are the only advanced country in the world that has chosen to leave health care to the tender mercies of a panoply for profit businesses whose purpose is to maximize income and not to provide health. And that's exactly what they do. Brother, as you were saying a moment ago, is saying to everybody who's not covered, we're going to mandate that you exercise that right.

We're going to mandate that you buy some form. We're going to deliver the private insurance companies a captive market. That's right. They love that. They love that. His policy does work. It delivers to the private insurance industry, a captive market. By the mandate. By the mandate. For whatever price they want to charge. And so this will increase costs. And let me tell you what he's running into. And he'd like to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat but he won't be able to. If you leave this profit oriented system in place, you can't both control costs and increase coverage. You inevitably, if you try to increase coverage, increase costs. The only answer, the only answer. And he said it at the beginning of his press conference is a single payer system. In his first sentence, he said, that is the only way to cover everyone. But he's also said, if we were starting the system from scratch, we could have single payer. But we're not starting this system from scratch.

You know, you don't pour more money into a failing system. You convert. I saw back in the spring, the chief lobbyist for the big foreign industry, Billy Tozen, used to remember Congress. He was on CNBC. And he was in support of this bill, whatever this bill is, because it would broaden the industry's customer base by providing subsidies for people to buy more coverage. More coverage from the private insurance. Why would a price they want to try? It will be a bananza for the health insurance industry and a bananza for the pharmaceutical industry. And for the doctors too, because the doctors are going to get more paying patients, because people will now have this ticket, this insurance card, that they can whip out when they need medical services. So, does this explain why Harry and Louise, who were around 15 years ago, to help defeat Bill Clinton's health plan, Bill and Hillary Clinton's health plan, are back now in support, seemingly to be in support. Let me show you the commercial that's been running now.

Watch closely. Well, it looks like we may finally get health care reform. It's about time, because every day, more and more people are finding they can't afford health care. Or they're losing coverage. We need good coverage people can afford. Coverage they can get. Even if they have a pre-existing condition, and coverage they can keep if they change jobs. Or lose their jobs. Sounds simple enough. A little more cooperation, a little less politics, and we can get the job done this time. Wouldn't it make you think that big farmer is supporting health care reform? That's what they're supposed to be. But on their terms, right? On your terms, exactly. This is what those ads are supposed to do. They're supposed to make the ordinary person believe that they're good guys this time around. And on their terms, means what for them? Well, they can charge whatever they want. That there will be no bargaining. The Medicare. Medicare and Part D will not bargain for lower prices. There will be no formularies. You know, even this thing about the pharmaceutical industry

is going to kick in 80 billion dollars over 10 years. That the president mentioned in the press conference. Only if the health care first. First, this is 8 billion a year for the pharmaceutical industry. This is chunk change. And second, it's only for brand-named drugs. So in a sense, it's a subsidy for the most expensive drugs. Do you believe the health care industry when it tells President Obama that we will voluntarily cut costs? No. I mean, these are investor-owned businesses. If they behave like charities, heads would roll in the executive suites. They are there to maximize profits and that's exactly what they do. What happened now is that the industries, industries, have gotten pretty much they want out of the bills that are going forward. And so what's happening is that they need to build public support. They need to make everybody in the public realize that they actually are wearing white hats in this one. But behind the scenes, they are lobbying ferociously

against the public plan, against cuts in doctors fees, against all kinds of things that they don't want. And for that, they're using a different sort of lobbying tactic. All of these are communications or lobbying strategies that they know how to do and they are very excellent at doing them. It's clear that they can turn it to their advantage. That nobody is really trying to break there except the single-payer people. They're a death grip on the system. I hear you have hundreds of for-profit insurance companies that maximize their income by denying care to the people who need it most. And that's the insurance system. That's how we pay for healthcare. But you also have to look at how we deliver healthcare. And we deliver that primarily or largely in for-profit facilities, businesses, hospitals, whose interest is in delivering only profitable care. So we have a system that through and through

and both the payment system and the delivery system is oriented toward profits. Neither the Senate nor the House is doing anything to change that. But the president says there will be a public option in my bill that will compete with the private insurance to bring the cost down. That's what he says. That's what he says. Again, we get back to the detailed question and the particulars which are so absent in this whole discussion. We don't know what a public plan will look like and even if there's going to be a public plan. The insurers don't want it. It's not clear that the doctors want it and the pharmaceutical companies don't want it. So my question is, are they working behind the scenes to make sure this doesn't happen? My guess is, my answer is they probably are. A lot of said about how the public wants to cling to what it has. What I'm finding is something that confirms the polls that have been done showing that something like two-thirds of the public would favor a Canadian style

or a Medicare for all-style single-payer system. The same is true of physicians now. About 60% of physicians favor Medicare for all or a single-payer system. So what is against it? The pharmaceutical and the insurance industries are the biggest lobbies in Washington. They spend millions and millions on influential members of Congress and the amount that they are spending now to the chairman of the relevant health committees has increased enormously in the past few months. Just the other day, the Chamber of Commerce began running an advertising campaign. And the Chamber says a new government-run plan will undermine employer-sponsored coverage and eventually lead to a government takeover of the health care system. That will limit patients' choices. I mean, isn't that proving to be a convincing argument with the public that seems to be? Well, it's phony, of course.

It's phony. In the sense that Medicare is a single-payer system embedded within our larger market-based system, you have totally free choice of a position in Medicare. You don't, in most employer-sponsored private plans, Canada totally free choice of doctors. So this is simply not true. Let me show you both a couple of clips from the House floor recently and get your comments on them. These are two congressmen who are opposed to any kind of national insurance or general copies. Look at this. They're going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line, places like Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. People die when they're in line. One in five people have to die because they went to socialize medicine. Now, I've got three daughters in a wife. I would hate to think that among five women, one of them is going to die

because we go to socialize care and we have to have these long lists to get a mammogram once you find it, to get treatment, it is insane. We've heard these arguments since 1948. And what amazes me? When they oppose the national health system under a federal government. Yeah. So that notion, that conventional wisdom in America is pretty ingrained and pretty deep. What they fail to say here is that people are waiting in line in America. We ration care in America. And we do it by income. People who don't have money and the ticket to health care do not get the care. So that rationing has taken place. But even people who do have insurance are waiting months for mammograms. And Florida, there's been a horrible shortage of places where women can go and get mammograms. And most people have to wait a long time to get an appointment with a doctor for an annual physical.

If we continue to spend what we do right now on health care but had a system that distributed it according to medical need, there would be no rationing. And if we held it at that cost, there would never be any rationing. So it's simply not right. The problem is not the money. It's the system. There is more than enough in the system already. And that's why I don't think it's a good idea to pour more money into a dysfunction system. Obama said in his press conference, the worst thing we can do is nothing. The most costly thing we can do is nothing. Now, I disagree with that. You can throw more money into this system and make it even more costly. But in a sense, we are at a point now where we have to act and we have to confront the private insurance industry directly. Do you see any evidence that the president wants to do that? No, no. But what I would say this time around, and now I'm going to be very pessimistic, Bill,

this time around, I don't think it's going to happen because of the power of the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies. I don't think it's going to happen. But I would rather see Obama go down fighting for something coherent and practical that the public could mobilize behind, then go down fighting for this amorphous plan that tries to keep the private insurance industry in place. It seems to me like they're more finessing than fighting. Well, they will have. But I think they'll go down. They've been finessing since the very beginning. They've been finessing since the campaign. During the campaign, he was not even willing to be pinned down. He had a whole list of things that he would like to do, but so did Hillary Clinton and John McCain. And in some ways, they really weren't all that far apart except on the issue of long-term care. That is another time bomb that is awaiting America and nobody has talked about it.

But aside from that, I see an administration that is trying to keep this playbook going as long as possible and to commit as little as possible until the 11th hour. And by then, it's going to be too late for the American people to know what's going to await them. And as a journalist whose job it is to explain to the average person on the street what all of this means to them, that's not happening. And as a journalist, that troubles me. The press has not dealt with the issue of how this is going to affect the auto mechanic on Main Street or the babysitter. But we don't know what this is. But we know the outlines enough. We know about the individual mandate. We sort of know that if there's a public plan, it might be this tearing arrangement that has a bronze silver and gold kind of arrangement. And you can pay more if you have more, which still perpetuates the problem that we have. We know enough so that journalists can write the story. Do I hear you're both saying in effect what Bill Crystal,

the Republican strategy said this week, kill this bill, kill this proposal that Obama is pressing and start over? Well, not exactly. Not exactly. But I'm hesitating because I don't think he's grasped the metal. And I don't think that even the best of the proposals that he is considering are going to be effective. And I worry about even the public option because... You've been skeptical. I'm skeptical of that because the power of the insurance industry is so great that I believe that they would use their clout in Congress to hobble the public option in some way and have it become a dumping ground for the sickest patients and then cream off the profitable ones for themselves. And then what people would decide is that the public option was no good that the government couldn't do anything right.

And that would be the wrong lesson to draw. That's what some people fear will happen to Medicare. That it will be privatized in some way to deal with it. It's a hard deal. And only the sickest people will remain in the Medicare pool of people who get benefits. I want to go back to Crystal's argument and what he sort of know what the conservative plan might look like. It's basically a market-based approach that would rely on private insurance, but also on what is a relatively new kind of insurance arrangement called consumer-driven healthcare. And by that, we mean policies that have very high deductibles. I've seen some being sold by some of the Blue Cross plans that have been $20,000 deductibles and $40,000 if you go out of network. So is that really insurance? And our people are going to be buying these because they will be affordable because the higher the deductible, the cheaper the policy.

And so then what's going to happen to them when a serious illness strikes and they have to cough up the money? They're not going to have it. So this whole issue of under insurance, which is kind of tied in with the conservative approach, hasn't even been discussed. Given what you've said, why the rush? Why not slow this down and give this very big issue more due deliberation? It's really a political calculation and I think that they believe that they have to act quickly because it might not happen because the sooner you have the special interest going back home during the August recess and holding town hall meetings and talking to people in coffee shops, they're going to find that maybe this isn't something that people really want or have doubts about. Well, I think we are in a hurry. I think that President Obama's worried that what happened with the Clinton plan can happen with him. And I do have a feeling of deja vu all over again that this is like 1993, that the opposition is having a chance to mobilize,

to march out these Canadians who say they had brain tumors and had to die or these ads that say 20% of Europeans got dead. And I think he does. He is right to worry about that and he is right to want to do it in a hurry. The problem is, is he's not doing the right thing. Because? Well, the plan is not for all the reasons we've said. It leaves the bad guys in place and it tries to kind of make concessions. And what the Clinton's found out is, they too wanted to keep the private insurance industry at the table and maybe regulate them a little and what the private insurance industry decided was why should we take half a loaf and we can have a whole thing? And that's what I'm seeing happening now. We are having the same debate almost that we had in 93, 94. And that's something I've written about for the Columbia Journalism Review.

It's actually the same debate we've had decades before. And it's the unwillingness to look at what might, what we could learn from other systems. Single-payer, multiple-pares as they have in Germany and Japan or even in the Netherlands where there are private payers. What's really happening there? So I think there's an unwillingness on the part of politicians, on the part of advocacy groups, some advocacy groups, to really educate Americans on what the possibilities are. And we at CJR have been saying we really have not had a vibrant discussion about other possibilities. I think we have to start all over on this. I really do. I think we have to go for a single-payer system. You could institute that gradually. You could do it state by state. You could do it decade by decade. You could improve Medicare. That is, make it non-profit. But extend it down to age 55,

then age 45, then age 35. It would give the private insurance industry a chance to go into hurricanes or earthquakes or something to get out of the health business. It could be done gradually. I think that has to be done. And it's the only thing that can be done. The story goes on, and we'll continue to talk about it in the months to come, all right? All right. Marcia Angel, Judy Lieberman. Thank you for being with me on the journey. My pleasure. Thank you. Claims Department, Ernestine Tomlin. No, not covered. We consider that an elective procedure, meaning we elect not to pay for it. Well, it's not our fault you've had too hard. It actually should have stopped at one. Of course, you have your choice of doctor. Do you want the doctor? We give you or not. It's your choice. You must think HMO stands for Help Me Out. Remember your health is our business, not our concern. There was another voice heard on health care this week. The voice of anti-abortion crusader, Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue. At a news conference in Washington,

Terry warned that violence could come if, in the end, health care reform includes coverage for abortion services. Do not expect us to betray God and to pay for the murder of our neighbor. If you do, you are deceived, you are deluded. We will not comply, and there will be unthinkable, horrifying ramifications. People will react. Whether they react peacefully, yet forcefully, and with forethought, or whether they react viscerally with eruptions of rage. As Randall Terry knows well, that rage has erupted many times already. Neyrao, the National Organization, working for Women's Reproductive Rights, claims that over the past 30 years, actions against abortion providers included eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 175 arsones, more than 5,000 acts of vandalism,

and nearly 14,000 harassing phone calls and hate mail incidents. Randall Terry himself has been arrested dozens of times for leading protest at clinics where women in the doctors were subjected to harassment and intimidation. In 1991, thousands of protesters with Terry and the lead were arrested outside the clinic of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. Operation Rescue dubbed it the summer of mercy. Dr. Tiller was one of the few physicians in the country performing late-term abortions for women with problem pregnancies whose health was at stake from life-threatening complications or whose infants would be born dead or dying. But abortion foes turned Tiller into an object of hate and violent attacks. His clinic was bombed in 1986, and in 1993, he was shot in both arms by a woman with a semi-automatic pistol. Then, two months ago, Dr. Tiller was murdered, gunned down at the Reformation Lutheran Church where he wasn't ushered.

After the shooting, Randall Terry said this about Tiller. He was a mass murderer. We have to say that over and over again. He was one of the most evil people on the planet. Every bit is evil as Nazi war criminals. Now, I know that that offends some people that are watching this, but it is the truth. He was a mass murderer, and he reaped what he sowed. In demonizing George Tiller, Randall Terry had helped from the star of Fox News, Bill O'Reilly. For years, O'Reilly denounced the doctor as someone who would, quote, kill a baby for no reason whatsoever other than the mother has a pain in her foot. That wasn't true, of course, but 24 times altogether O'Reilly denounced Tiller as a baby killer. In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000. Dr. George Tiller, known as Tiller, the baby killer, Tiller aborts thousands of babies pretty much for any reason. I want a George Tiller and Tiller, the baby killer, going,

hey, I can make more money killing babies now. That a man like that can openly operate and the USA is troubling to say the least. Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. I wouldn't want to be these people if there is a judgment day. Judgment day did come on the last Sunday in May. When the suspected assassin was captured a few hours later, police found a single rose in the rear window of his car, a common marker of the anti-abortion movement. Soon after the shooting, O'Reilly himself came under attack as people started asking if demonizing rhetoric inspires violence. O'Reilly, while condemning Tiller's murder, dismissed the accusations. When I heard about Tiller's murder, I knew pro-abortion zealots and Fox news haters would attempt to blame us for the crime, and that is exactly what has happened. Every single thing we said about Tiller was true, and my analysis was based on those facts. Unless the accused killer Scott Rotor tells us, we'll never know what was in his head that day,

where he got the idea to murder, or how it grew in his mind. There's no evidence that he ever listened to O'Reilly or Randall Terry, just as there's no proof that hateful words lead to violence. But words do have consequences. There's no doubt they poison the air all of us breathe, and no doubt that terrible things can be done by the people who breathe that same air. As news spread of Dr. Tiller's assassination and more details emerged, I thought back to what happened in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 27, 2008. One year ago, this coming Monday. Here's a report we broadcast a few weeks later, produced by Peter Marriage, and reported by Rick Carr. Those of you who saw it then will remember that some of the language is graphic, provocative, and downright raw. On a steamy Sunday morning in July, a man armed with a 12-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead,

another mortally wounded, and six injured. The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27, was armed with a gun, but he was also armed with hatred. He was armed with bitterness. He was armed with resentments. He was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit. Members of the congregation wrestled a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, named Jim David Atkinson to the floor, and held him until police came. At first, it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence, until a police news conference the next day. It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement. Why did Atkinson hate the liberal movement? Police said that he told them that all liberals

should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and ruined every institution in America. Police said that Atkinson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church because of its liberal teachings. The Church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Atkinson said that because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement, that he would target those that had voted them into office. In the weeks following the tragedy, the congregation and its pastor, Reverend Chris Bice, struggled with what they were learning about Atkinson. Some have suggested that his spiritual attitudes, his hatred of liberals and gays, was reinforced by the right-wing media figures. And it is beyond dispute that there is a plethora of books which have labeled liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless, and treasonous.

During that recent sermon, Bice told his congregation some who'd risk their lives to stop the shooting that he's been reading some of those books. One book has the title, Deliver Us From Evil, Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. If that author were here in this room right now, I would introduce him to some good liberals who acted decisively on that Sunday, acted quickly and courageously to stop the terror that came into our church building. I would introduce him to some good liberals who know how to fight terror with more than just their mouths. Applause Bice says even with the outpouring of sympathy from around Knoxville and across the country, Atkinson's lethal anger has left him angry and full of questions. People were killed in my sanctuary of my church, which should be the holy place,

the safe place of people who were injured. A man came in here, totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human? Bice admits that no one knows for sure and says that Atkinson alone is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in Atkinson's apartment. Books by popular right wing talk radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books found in Atkinson's apartment was Michael Savage's liberalism is a mental disorder. In it, Savage calls liberals the enemy within our country, an enemy more dangerous than Hitler, traders who are dangerous to your survival and who should be placed in a straight jacket. Like Atkinson, Savage accuses liberals of tying the hands of our military. Savage isn't just a best-selling author. He also hosts a syndicated radio show. And now, America's most exciting radio talk show,

The Savage Nation. Savage reaches more than eight and a quarter million listeners a week. And when it comes to demonizing liberals, he's the same on the air as he is in print. Liberalism is in essence the HIV virus. And it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church, they've attacked particularly the Catholic church for 30 straight years. The police attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military attacked for the last 50 years by the Bobber box of viruses on our planet. Political liberals aren't the only targets of Savage's wrath. Back when he had a cable TV show, he bashed gay men. So you're one of those Sodomites. Yeah. Are you a Sodomite? Yes, I am. Oh, you're one of the Sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Oh. Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down your piece of garbage. You got nothing to do today.

Go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trickin' osus. And on his radio show, he targeted kids with autism. I'll tell you what autism is. In 99% of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream in their silent? They don't have a father around to tell him, don't act like a moron, you'll get nowhere in life, stop acting like a putz. Straighten up, act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot. Fire Savage now! That outburst prompted protests by outraged parents and a few stations dropped Savage's show, so did an advertiser, but Savage hasn't apologized and he's still on the air. America's being overrun by an invasion force from Mexico that'll soon take over the country. Use psychotic liberals don't even know you're digging your own grave and throwing lime in there. All it's missing is the worm from the tequila bottle to go with it. Michael Savage isn't the only right-wing talk radio host who launches blistering even violent verbal attacks on people in groups he doesn't like.

Glenn Beck, for instance, fantasized about murdering a liberal filmmaker. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know? And I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claimed that 9-11 was an inside job that US government conspiracy deserved to die. Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors of this country and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors. That's what they are. And you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet. Neil Bortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina. That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless.

New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them. Muslims are some of Bortz's favorite targets. It's Ramadan. And Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it's because Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sort of like cockroaches. Reverend Chris Bice says he's heard that kind of language before. If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions

that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disjockeys would call the Tutsis cockroaches. And there is the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorists, that's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors. Millions of Americans tune into right wing talk radio every day. Rory O'Connor is a media critic and a liberal himself who's written a book on shock talkers. He says not all of these broadcasters use violent language, but they do all share a predilection for outrage. And he says they're all practically addicted to constantly cranking up that outrage. Here's the real problem.

When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it's not shocking any longer. It's already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? And I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately there's going to be some deranged person out there in that audience who's going to say, you know what? That's a good idea. Let me act on that. The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment. Entertainers. That's what a lot of the shock talkers call themselves. O'Connor says maybe, but their words can motivate their listeners to act. First and foremost, we have to recognize that many of them are employed across multiple platforms. So they may say something on their radio show, but they may repeat it on their television show. They may then repeat it in their newspaper column. They may repackage the ideas into their best-selling books. The debate over the Immigration Reform Bill

became a case study for Rory O'Connor. As arguments went back and forth, some of the language turned venomous. Hosts amped up their audiences' outrage with attacks on the Bill's supporters and verbal assaults on immigrants. I already have received at least one brilliant email today about the immigration problem. This person sent me an email, said, when we defeat this illegal alien amnesty bill, and when we yank out the welcome mat, and they all start going back to Mexico as a going away gift lets all give them a little box of nuclear waste. Tell them it'll heat tortillas. But do you understand what the New York Times wants and the far left want? They want to break down the white Christian male power structure of which you're a part, and so am I. And they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.

Right wing talk radio hosts usually reserve their ad hominem attacks for liberal figures. Jim Quinn has his own name for the national organization for women. The national organization for whores. They're whores for liberal politics. In general, and they were whores for Bill Clinton in particular. Glenn Beck tried to connect former vice president Al Gore's efforts against global warming with Nazism. Well, it was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews. Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to, you know, Al Gore is not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy, the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the UN's enemy, global warming. American politics has always been a rough game.

But political scientist Jeffrey Feldman, who's written the book on the effects of angry political rhetoric, says this is different. Our system is a deliberative democracy. And that deliberative democracy depends on a certain kind of talk, a certain conversation in order to function well. What right wing rhetoric does when it reaches that violent pitch is it undermines that particular conversation, such that the focus of political debate becomes increasingly hamstrung by fear and the ability of citizens to engage in the basic act of civics becomes gummed up that conversation breaks down. Knoxville pastor Chris Byes agrees. When you blame all your problems on some minority group, then everyone else is exonerated. We exonerate ourselves. We don't have to look at ourselves to see what sort of ways we contribute to the problems of the world. We don't have to examine ourselves to see what we're doing that is helping to create the problems that we're so concerned about. In other words, Byes says angry talk radio rhetoric

simply sets up scapegoats for society's problems. And ever since Jim David Adkinson walked into his church and opened fire, he can't help but wonder whether that might lead to more violence. I just think a lot of people are hurling insults from the safety of television studios, the safety of radio, the safety of cyber space, which they would not throw if they had to stand right next to a person and look in their face and say the same thing. And so that's a void in our community, the chance to be in the same room and to have these exchanges and remember the humanity of the person on the other side. That report aired on the Journal of September 12, 2008. Earlier this year, when Jim David Adkinson was sentenced to life behind bars, he released what he called a manifesto, a four-page statement he wrote before his shooting spree. It was a manifesto alright, spewing hate like fire and lava exploding from a volcano. This was a hate crime, he wrote.

I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There's a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country and these liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in the nation. Trying to turn this country into a communist state. Among the targets of his malice, the Democratic National Committee for running such a radical leftist candidate, Osama Hussein Obama, Yo mama, no experience, no brains, a joke, dangerous to America. Liberals, Adkinson, went on are evil like termites, millions of them, each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. He longed to exterminate the traitors one by one. Who I wanted to kill, he wrote, was every Democrat in the Senate and House. The 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book, full disclosure, I'm one of the hundred, but Adkinson laminated. These people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals and high-ranking offices of the Marxist movement, so I went after the foot soldiers,

the chicken liberals that vote in these traitorous people. And that's how Adkinson decided on his victims. He would go after the foot soldiers, the congregation in the church he described as a den of un-American vipers. He had a patriotic imperative for anyone who read or heard his manifesto. Do something for your country before you go. Go kill liberals. Do I think any conservative commentator wished for what happened in Knoxville last year? Or to Dr. George Tiller, in which you told two months ago? Not for a minute. The killer who pulled the trigger is the guilty party. But do I wish the vendors of venom and their sponsors would think harder about how angry words become accomplices of falldeeds? Yes, I do most certainly. Especially as the words and crazy theories and militias and other elements of the lunatic fringe are given even a shred of credibility by their repetition in the conspicuous conservative media. God only knows the price we paid

when we turned political opponents to be debated into mortal enemies to be eliminated. Now, when some of those who shout through the megaphone of right-wing radio hear a critique like this, they immediately throw a fit. They claim that people like me are calling for a return to the fairness doctrine. Some of you remember the fairness doctrine adopted 60 years ago by the Federal Communications Commission. It said that opposing points of view had to be presented on radio or TV in a way that was honest, equitable, and balanced. If not, said the FCC, a station could lose its license. Ronald Reagan abolished the doctrine in 1987, but mentioned it today, and the Rush Limbaugh's of the world still scream like martyrs being stretched on the rack. These people earn millions inciting riots in the public mind. If they were required to be fair, they would soon be pennilist out on the street cup in hand. So, when we first telecast our report on the killings in Knoxville last year,

some of them threw a tantrum, as if our criticism of their malicious rhetoric was a call for government censorship. Now, it's true that in this current climate of mean speak, some members of Congress and others have called for reinstating the fairness doctrine, but I'm not one of them. The doctrine is a throwback to a time when there were a lot fewer ways to hear news and opinion than there are in today's universe of websites, blogs, and tweets. Just last week, the two new commissioners to the FCC expressed their strong opposition to its restoration. The new FCC chairman is opposed to. Conservatives, nonetheless, wave the fallacious threat of its return as a bloody flag, lofted above the straw man, they evoke to royal the faithful and keep the cash registers ringing. So, let me say it again. The first amendment protection of a free press extends to the Savage Nation, as surely as it does to the Nation magazine. Anyway, you can't coerce taste.

Fairness is not a doctrine to be enforced, but a choice to be made, a responsibility to be honored. That's it for this week, but the journal continues at our website, log onto pbs.org and click on Bill Moria's journal, where you can find out more about the history of talk radio and free speech and follow the debate on health care reform. I'm Bill Moria's, see you next time. Follow the dollars in health care reform, log on at pbs.org. This episode of Bill Moria's journal

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