Follow-Up: Virtually No U.S. Media Interest In 'Imploding' Canadian Press State-Run Health Care Story

On Sunday evening, NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard highlighted a health care-related story from the Canadian Press (CP), which is that country's rough equivalent to the USA's Associated Press.

It appears that the CP is more open to reporting inconvenient news than is "our" AP, judging from a report earlier that day by the CP's Jennifer Graham. In an interview with Graham, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association said that the supposedly idyllic wonderland known as Canadian medical care is in deep trouble. Lo and behold, Graham actually reported it:

The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.

"We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize," Doing (sic) said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Given the current debate in the U.S. over health care and private insurance, and the president's seeming determination to force a state-controlled and ultimately state-run health care regime onto the remaining portion of the system that is still privately run, you would think that the story out of Canada might have attracted the interest of U.S. establishment media outlets. Noel thought that "It's going to be absolutely delicious to see how this gets reported by Obama-loving media in the next 24 hours."

Four days later, deliciously proving that "the Obama-loving media" is more than a mere slogan, there has virtually no original source establishment media coverage of what Ms. Doig said, or of anything else relayed in the Graham's CP report.

The incoming CMA director's last name made searching for results pretty easy. What I found in a search on "Doig" at the following media sites was the following:

• The New York Times -- nothing.
• The Washington Post -- zip.
• The Los Angeles Times -- nothing relevant.
• The AP, whose search scope is seven days -- nada.

A Google News search on "Anne Doig" for August 16-20 came back with a whopping 41 relevant items. Only about 20 of those were from sources within the U.S. The majority of those results were op-ed columns by Mona Charen, Larry Elder, and others, plus think-tank contributions from Heritage and the National Center for Policy Analysis. Original news reports appear to have been limited to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (a four-sentence snippet), the Washington Times (in an editorial), and NewsMax (in the final paragraphs of a related article about health care rationing in the Canadian province of British Columbia).

As Noel also pointed out on Sunday, both the outgoing and incoming CMA presidents are advocates of expanding private medical services up north. While our president and the congressional majority are attempting to move health care decisively in a statist direction, the establishment media has apparently decided that news consumers couldn't possibly benefit from learning that there is significant sentiment in Canada's medical community for going the opposite way.

I mean, really, how silly of a thought is that? (/sarcasm)

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.