Steve alerted me to a new service CNN is offering. Take a look:

See the little t-shirt icon next to some of the headlines. Yes, they’re selling t-shirts of their headlines! No, not kidding. See:

This election season, this is what they’re rolling out. Because nothing will make CNN more useful than CNN headlines on t-shirts.

TPM reacting to CNN.com posting a poll asking whether Obama has “enough patriotism” to be President, a ridiculous push-poll style question if there ever was one:

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Ben Smith, at The Politico, flags that today CNN’s running a ‘online poll’ asking if Barack Obama has enough patriotism to be president. As Ben, with some understatement, put it’s “it’s odd to see the mainstream media drive a largely whispered question that none of his main, named critics — Hillary, McCain, or the RNC — will touch.” Yeah, I’d say so.

That’s how it works. Starts at right-swing smear sites and hoax emails. Then the AP’s Nedra Pickler, who specializes in scooping up this slop and laundering it into the mainstream press, writes it up for the AP that runs across the country. And then picks it up and makes it a regular part of the campaign conversation.

I doubt some top exec at CNN came up with this or any name anchor. It’s some producer in the bowels of the operation. But it amounts to the same thing because it’s part of the culture and there’s no accountability.

Get ready for more.

No, I’d rather not get ready for more. I’d rather do something to fix this, because I’m tired of seeing Nedra Pickler and CNN complete the Matt Drudge cycle. Their job is to vet information and present their opinion to us. Not to repeat anonymous smear emails they see on the Internet.

It’s ridiculous. How can we beat this kind of garbage?

What possible justification could CNN have for this juxtaposition:

Sometimes, you wonder if there’s some weird GOP conspiracy. Not that this is horrendously propagandist or something, but it’s quite bizarre for someone to have made that mistake.

Clips of Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room today are making the rounds. The clip is below, but that’s not really the interesting bit in my mind. Moore is upset and it’s satisfying to see that, no doubt. After looking at the transcript for the segment before the Moore clip, though, I was appalled.

The segment before was a clip of Sanjay Gupta criticizing Sicko for “fudging” some facts. I’m checking to see if it’s part of a longer segment, but the editing of this clip was appalling. Here’s the transcript:

It’s true that the United States is the only country in the Western world without free universal access to health care. But you won’t find medical utopia elsewhere. The film is filled with content Canadians and Brits sitting in waiting rooms, confident care will come.

In Canada, you can be waiting for a long time. A survey of six industrialized nations found that only Canada was worse than the United States when it came to waiting for a doctor’s appointment for a medical problem.

PAUL KECKLEY, DELOITTE HEALTH CARE ANALYST: That’s the reality of those systems. There are quotas. There are planned wait times. The concept that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it’s not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes. And as a proportion of their household income, it’s a significant number.

GUPTA: It’s true that the French pay higher taxes and so does nearly every country ahead of the United States on that list. But even higher taxes don’t give all the coverage everyone wants.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fifteen-to-20 percent of the population will purchase services outside the system of care run by the government.

GUPTA: So, there’s no perfect system anywhere. But no matter how much Moore fudged the facts — and he did fudge some facts — there’s one everyone agrees on. The system here should be far better. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

Take a look at the two sentences I highlighted. In the first, Gupta is apparently taking issue with the wait times in the Canadian system. The powerful evidence is that we’re 5th. That means that 4 countries with national healthcare systems are ahead of us since, as they point out merely 3 sentences before, we’re the only major industrialized nation without a national system. That’s hardly evidence of “the reality of those systems,” no matter what you get a Deloitte analyst to say.

The second sentence is even worse because it has no context. Is that in Canada? Britain? nationalized healthcare in general? And, more importantly, why is that bad? If services include elective surgeries/services (e.g. teeth whitening, breast augmentation) or extra piece-of-mind services, is that really a case against having a baseline set of services everyone can have?

In both cases, simply adding some more facts and maybe a minute to the report would’ve made it informative. Instead, we end up with a crappy report full of ambiguous but ominous sounding “facts” and no actual information.

Heidi and I went to see Sicko a while back, but I haven’t had enough time to sit down to do some of the research I wanted to do before writing. Fact is, this is a complicated issue and, as I do with all of Moore’s movies, I want to take some care to dive below the surface of his story.

Update: Oops, forgot the clip. Here’s Moore shouting at Wolf Blitzer:

Clearly, he was talking about Gupta as a “generic” CNN reporter with the embed comment. He seemed a bit worked up and didn’t quite make sense.

But we won’t ever know because the media won’t tell us. Seriously, he is a sketchy, sketchy guy. I don’t understand how he’s still Speaker.

Via Atrios