A reader from outside DC writes to disagree about healthcare policy stories being too complicated and slow moving to get a lot of air/print time:
Engaging health care stories aren’t too complicated for newspapers in the flyover states. They’ve been doing the personal health bankruptcy stuff for months and folding it into the larger picture.
It ain’t that complicated, this is what papers do outside of D.C. They look at an important public issue and, realizing it’s complex, dry or technical, figure out ways to make it interesting and easy to understand. They find local people and talk to them and report what they hear in ways that people who live around there absorb.
….As a big fan and daily reader, I am chagrined with your simplistic analysis of why the press corps is bungling the health care story. It’s an absence of will, direction, hustle and journalistic acumen — a dearth of basic story-telling skills and common sense — that binds these D.C. sycophantic editors and reporters to everyone in DC. But it is not because the story is too complicated.
Anyone else from outside the Beltway care to chime in on this? Is coverage of healthcare policy really better in Des Moines than it is in the Washington Post?
