If Fox News is not news, according to the White House, then what is CBS' "60 Minutes"? If Sunday's lineup is an example, it's flirting with becoming Obama TV.
It began its program with a piece on Medicare fraud - a worthy topic. But it's all about "perspective," as President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said of Fox's reporting.
Steve Kroft began the segment with, "Of all the problems facing the United States right now, none are more important than health care. President Obama says rising costs are driving huge federal budget deficits that imperil our future and that there is enough waste and fraud in the system to pay for health care reform if it were eliminated."
Who says health care reform is the biggest issue in the country - "60 Minutes," the president or the people of the United States? Polls consistently show the economy outranks health care reform on the list of Americans' concerns. But it certainly is Obama's chief concern as he seeks to overhaul the U.S. health system this fall. Kroft did mention that the $60 billion fraud industry raises "troubling questions" about the government's ability to run a bigger health care bureaucracy and told a chilling tale of how easy it is to defraud taxpayers. But the entire story is framed under the auspices that the government says this is the biggest issue, so therefore it should be covered.
That segment was followed by what can only be called an epilepsy advocacy piece by Katie Couric focused on Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod and his wife, Susan. Their family faced a huge struggle with a disease that struck their daughter Lauren, 28, as an infant. Theirs is a compelling story and the debate over funding for epilepsy certainly is a worthy public policy issue. But with three million people suffering from the disease in the United States, according to Couric, aren't there others who could have served as her protagonists? There was nothing particularly newsy about the piece that made them necessary headliners.
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