Alex Massie Alex Massie

Public Services vs Government Services

During the latest bout of America’s interminable health care wars, Fox News decided that its presenters should refer to the “public option” as the “government option” or “government-run health insurance”. Big deal, you may say and you would have a point, but this has people in a tizzy about Fox’s “bias”. As if this had previously been a mystery! Happily Jack Shafer is on hand to defend what Andrew Sullivan calls, oddly, the “indefensible”:

The call to refer to the program as the government option instead of the public option came from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Media Matters and Kurtz report. But this shouldn’t disqualify the new term from the Fox News stylebook. Government option is superior to public option in that it emphasizes that the government—and thus the taxpayers—will be footing the bill. As a modifier, public has many nongovernmental uses, as in public appearance, public figure, public display, public-key cryptography, public editor, public enemy, public storage, and public opinion.

But when government is used as an adjective, there is no such confusion. Does that make Fox News’ semantic solution superior? I’ve always thought that Social Security should be renamed Government Ponzi Scheme. I’d also like the Export-Import Bank to be renamed the Government Subsidy Depot—but that’s another column.

That Sammon issued a memo directing Fox News reporters to use a phrase he considers more accurate hardly constitutes “spin,” as the headline to Kurtz’s piece has it. If government option is spin, isn’t public option spin, too?

The only thing wrong with Shafer’s column is that it doesn’t go far enough. Of course public option is spin. The same thing happens in Britain too. Consider public services and public spending. Only a heartless Tory cad could be against services for the public; only the most wretched misantrhope could object to anything as wholesome and virtuous as spending for the public!

But if you – we – talked about government-run services and government spending we might view these matters differently.

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