Cyber Propaganda

I get the same feeling reading the web site, www.healthreform.gov. It's one thing for an administration to marshal its powers of persuasion to promote a program it believes it was elected to carry out. Radio addresses, dispatching minions to Sunday talk shows, strong-arming members of Congress - that's all part of political battles. But it is something else again to launch a .gov web site purporting to support the transparency goals of the administration, when what it really is, is pure campaign-style propaganda.

Government web sites are supposed to at least make a pretense of being neutral, to give straightforward information about what the government is up to. Most departmental sites have the decent taste to avoid becoming paeans to the Secretary. Most try to keep a straightforward tone to their news releases.

Not so with healthreform.gov. First of all, the site is wrongly named. Its subject is not health reform, but healthcare reform. There's a difference.

It also has a big technical problem. On my Mac running Safari, I got this error message over and over:

jCarousel: No width/height set for items. This will cause an infinite loop. Aborting

It didn't abort, but I had to keep closing the dialog box. This might be the Web 2.0 White House, but they need to get Web 1.0 right.

My real objection, though, is the relentless propaganda quality of the site. Worst is a big button marked, "State Your Support for Health Reform This Year."

One might ask a couple of questions.

First, what if I don't like President Obama's proposals are for "health" reform?

Which leads to the second question: What are his proposals? You can't tell, precisely, from anything on healthreform.gov.

There's a link to a white paper from the president entitled, "A New Era of Responsibility." This link starts at page 17. The health care stuff starts on page 25, if anyone bothers to scroll down.

There is a massive report from 3,276 meetings involving 30,000 people plus five regional White House forums. It all comes to a not-so-startling conclusion:

"Among reports discussing solutions, participants wanted a system that is fair (36%), patient-centered and choice-oriented (19%), simple and efficient (17%), and comprehensive (15%)" And costs less.

There is a PDF of the report from the president's White House workshop in March. There is testimony from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressing support for the president's ideas. There's a long video, complete with background music, of quintessential regular guy Travis Ulerick, fireman of quintessential Dublin, Indiana, who hosted one of the discussions. There are blogs, many referring to heart-wrenching stories.

It goes on and on.

The overall effect is one of being sold too hard on something about which I suspect the major decisions have already been made, indeed, were made long before the White House forum, long before the surveys the town meetings, long before the election.

Healthreform.gov is trying too hard. It's too produced, too pat, too much data all supporting one conclusion. The president might be right. I don't claim to know. Who in their right mind is against cheaper and better health care? But this web site may actually hurt the president's cause by overload of evidence all pointing one way, as if the White House gathered 30,000 props as background for what it knows it as wanted to do all along. I'd rather just get on with the debate.

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