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So, a couple of the points were selective use of statistics (the one that really blew me away was pointing out that Americans have shorter wait times for elective surgery as some kind of counter claim against them having longer wait times for non-elective surgery… doesn’t that suggest a complete misprioritization of resources?), but there were a number of points there where CNN just got their facts wrong. It’s just sad that within hours, Michael Moore can put up facts and links to back up his claims and demonstrate that CNN is off in left field.

Of course, it would be nice to see a similar list from Dr. Gupta’s piece, but that is not how the television medium works. Hopefully CNN will provide links on their website. I checked, and while there was a great shot of Dr. Gupta right on the front page of CNN’s “Health” section, I couldn’t find mention of any backing information for their story. They do have a written version of the story that reads a lot less ridiculously than the video I saw, although it still reads like he grabbed a few of his facts from a PR guy from the health industry and didn’t bother to check them. In CNN’s defense, I will say that I suspect most of the problems actually come from trying to compress a story down to the very short window that fits the TV format.

One thing this shows: CNN and TV news in general aren’t ready to for the Internet just yet. A 24-hour news service, with the resources that come with that, if really cognizant of Internet would have not even waited for Michael Moore to post his references, but would have immediately gone to the reporter’s notes and the fact checker’s notes (let’s just assume for the moment that CNN is still following those time honored traditions of journalism) and updated the web story to provide links to them. Instead, you will find plenty of links to promote other areas of the CNN site, as well as a number of links to advertisers, a link to a review of the movie, but no links to back up any facts in the article.

Indeed, a truly web-savvy news service would always include links to data that backs up their story, just on the off chance that their viewers were interested in learning more (sure the links would be selective, much as Michael Moore’s are, but like Michael Moore did, if you were smart you would select sources who were entirely credible, and most importantly, people would know where your data came from).

I mentioned in a previous entry that it seems the TV is coming to the Internet, and it perhaps isn’t going to be much better than the original. I guess one thing I am hoping gets better is that when TV news starts really moving to the Internet when a random factoid is bandied about in a story, there might simultaneously be a link to the source for that factoid. It might cut down on that time honored tradition of tossing about statistics without context or worse still, getting the context or stats so wrong that one has a hard time associating anything but deliberate intent to the cause of the problem.

I think it is safe to say that Michael Moore has on occasion done his own bit of misrepresenting things, and he certainly does not have a monopoly on the truth, but it seems that more and more traditional news services have been drawn so far from that hallowed ground by PR reps, a focus on profit over quality, etc., that it sadly non-traditional sources like Mr. Moore are the only ones who actually bothers to get their facts straight.

One parting shot on the health care issue itself. There was a time in American history when health care was often provided by practitioners who were expensive, had a poor track record of patient care, but who had the highest rates of customer satisfaction. These practitioners turned health care in to a confidence game, because they realized that making people feel like they were being taken care of was far cheaper and more profitable than actually taking care of them.

Those practitioners were called frauds and quacks, and it is high time that when someone like Dr. Gupta agrees that the US has significantly higher costs for health care, longer wait times for needed care, fewer people having access to health care, higher infant mortality rates, shorter life expectancies, doesn’t even make the top 30 nations in terms of quality of health care, and then points out that more context is needed because the US ranks highest in patient satisfaction, they ought to name that larger context: fraud and quackery, or at least use the more modern vernacular: “salesmanship”.