Usually it’s my colleague Arthur Alpert who catches the often-telling differences between how the Journal edits Associated Press stories and headlines, compared to how other papers run them.

This time I’m going to take a crack at it.

So check this out: The Journal ran an Associated Press story about the new health care reform law the other day with this headline: “Report: Overhaul to Raise Health Costs.”

What did that headline leave out? Hint: Here’s the headline that ran in the Tulsa World – and most of the other papers that carried that AP story – “Report Says Health Care will Cover More, Cost More.”

So, the Journal’s headline left out the key fact that the health care that’s talked about in the story will cover more – not just cost more.

Hey, now….taking over those duties was sort of fun, for a change! Hope Arthur doesn’t mind that I ventured onto his turf.

Like my colleague, Arthur Alpert, I too have been concerned the past week over the Albuquerque Journal’s partisan selectivity regarding stories about the escalating threats and violence that followed passage of historic health care reform. I’d like to piggyback on his accurate assessment because I don’t think the ugly craziness is going away any time soon and am disappointed in the Journal’s reluctance to speak out against it.

Like Alpert, I had wondered if the Journal would cover the threats being reported elsewhere on March 25. That very day, Heath Haussamen scooped the Journal when he posted on his NMPolitics.net  quotes from numerous New Mexico politicos, including Republican candidates for House and governor, who universally denounced the threats. Haussamen also weighed in with an incisive editorial, “Violence Is Unacceptable – And Un-American.”

It occurred to me that at the least, the Journal might run the reactions of New Mexicans, as Haussamen had. Then again, the Journal has been known to not cover stories simply because someone else got there first, and the comments could be viewed as merely political vote-getting fodder for all the candidates quoted, GOP or Dem, and not real news.

But as my colleague Alpert pointed out, the Journal ignored the story entirely. Instead, it ran what journalists call the “second-day” lead – that is, a story run with the assumption readers know what has transpired and which focuses instead on the “reaction” or follow-up a second-day story provides. That story, of course, was the McClatchy Newspapers report on House Republican whip Eric Cantor’s bizarre news conference, at which he claimed Democrats were “fanning the flames” of violence merely by reporting the acts and threatening phone calls against them – more than 10 incidents in all.

As Alpert point out, the McClatchy story chosen by the Journal focused on Cantor, who said his office in Richmond, Va., had been shot at (later debunked as random gunfire) and that he’d “received threats throughout his career for being Jewish.” I call the news conference bizarre because Cantor’s subtext was, “Hey, I get threats all the time and you don’t see me publicly complaining and ‘fanning the flames’.”  No, he just holds news conferences to rail against Democrats, who are making the violence worse by reporting it. Huh?

I would have liked to have had the Journal denounce the violence and the rhetoric – either by quoting someone or editorializing against it. Leslie Linthicum’s UpFront column, “In Health Care Battle, The Shouting Has Just Begun,” while thoughtful, was merely an acknowledgement of the “caustic chatter that has stood in for debate on the health care plan. “

No, I wanted more.

It didn’t come.

The Sunday Journal editorial March 28, “Demand Specific Fixes, Not just More Rhetoric,” railed against the damage the “seriously flawed” health care legislation could cause, and not against the potential violence damaging rhetoric could wreak.

Not surprisingly, more threats emerged in the days that followed: On Tuesday (March 31), we read in the Journal about the nine alleged members of a Christian militia group plotting to kill police officers in Michigan. Saturday, we read in the Journal that a group called Guardians of the Free Republics has been writing U.S. governors, including New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, demanding they leave office within three days or be removed.

I found myself going to the Web on this story, which was billed as a compilation “Journal Staff and Wire Report”, as it left me with unanswered questions, the most obvious of which would be: Were the threats directed only at Democrats, considering recent events? (The answer is no, and that the FBI expects all 50 governors will eventually get a letter. As of  lastWednesday, 30 governors had received a demand letter from the Texas-based “Guardians”, so again, the Journal’s a bit late in reporting it; perhaps it had to wait until Saturday to find a news hole large enough for its coverage.)

Granted, the impetus for the rise in anti-government sentiment can be directly tied to the failing economy, but the nasty rhetoric by millionaire mouthpieces like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh is like crack to violence-prone wingnuts. And then there’s Sarah Palin, whose message via Twitter told supporters: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’” and who actually posted online a U.S. map, targeting with crosshair shotgun sights,the Democrat House candidates she aims to campaign against in this year’s elections because they voted for what she calls “Obamacare”.

We need impartial voices to speak out against this kind of incendiary talk. The Journal has done it in the past: Harry Moskos’ column that ran Jan. 18 exposed the ludicrousness of Dick Cheney’s claim that President Obama should be blamed for the missteps that led to a potential suicide bomber boarding a plane to Detroit last December. Moskos column on political nastiness is a rational voice in the journalistic wilderness, and deserves to be read again.

Sadly, that column (“Here’s to Political Nastiness, Not Our President, Failing”) isn’t posted on the Journal’s site. A search turned up only a letter in disagreement.

It was all over the national newspapers, TV, cable and talk radio, but if you get national news only from the Albuquerque Journal – now there’s a chilling thought! – you might not know that last week somebody aimed verbal threats and violence at Democratic legislators who voted “yes” on health care reform.

You might even believe that last week Democratic leaders conspired to malign Republicans.

As I wrote in my last post, sometimes politics and journalism are so intertwined that Journal Watching requires very, very careful exposition. That’s the case here. Therefore –to demonstrate how readers might be misled – I will very, very carefully run down the story and the Albuquerque Journal’s treatment thereof.

Last Thursday, reporter Carl Hulse opened his N.Y. Times story (headlined, “After Health Vote, Threats on Democrats”) this way:

“Democratic lawmakers have received death threats and been the victims of vandalism because of their votes in favor of the health care bill, lawmakers and law enforcement officials said Wednesday…..”

The Washington Post wrote a very similar story and led with it.

The Albuquerque Journal carried no story.

Since the Journal has daily access to Washington Post news material, we can assume a deliberate decision not to publish.

Late last Thursday, on half-hearing a radio report about a Republican response, I smiled; the Journal would, I guess, run a story Friday morning and the GOP counter would be in the lead.

Darn, why didn’t I put money on it!

The Journal published a story Friday (on A4) under the headline: “Dems Accused of Exploitation.”
The sub-head was: “Rep. Says Threats Used as ‘Weapons.’” The story (from McClatchy Newspapers) devoted its first six paragraphs to the GOP argument, quoting Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, their House whip, at length.

Cantor said that Democratic members of Congress were not the only ones targeted. He said he’d been threatened, too, and a bullet had been fired through the window of his Richmond campaign office. Then he accused Democratic leaders of using the incidents for “political gain.”

Further down there were four graphs dealing with the threats and vandalism aimed at Democrats.
(McClatchy is a credible source, so I wondered if the Journal edited its account. But with my limited search skills, I couldn’t find out.)

The Times and Post published photos of the anti-Democratic vandalism. The Journal didn’t. The Times and Post mentioned phone calls threatening Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat whose anti-abortion efforts didn’t satisfy all his allies. The Journal didn’t.

Let’s switch to politics now for a moment.

Rep. Cantor was, of course, channeling Karl Rove, whose doctrine urges going right at the opposition’s strength, to blunt the point of the spear. That way, you confuse people or, with luck, persuade them the victim is the villain.

This Swiftboating (from the torpedoing of John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004) is a variation on scapegoating and -moral judgments aside – a brilliant political tactic.

Now let’s reconsider what the Journal did. Or didn’t.

First, it didn’t print the original story. Next it did publish a story heavy on the GOP rejoinder. And it headlined that rejoinder. Also, its account of the attacks on the Democrats lacked detail and photos.

Essentially, the Journal took GOP talking points and ran them prominently. Follow up by talking to the cops and FBI? No. Go beyond the tit-for-tat to offer context as I did with Rove’s doctrine?) Naturally not; they’re objective, you know.
The Journal’s aim was not journalistic, it was political, aimed at erasing sympathy for the attacked, distracting us from the perpetrators and portraying the GOP as victim.

That’s my conclusion, anyway. What’s yours? Did the Journal deal in journalism or partisanship?

While you’re pondering, be aware that the N.Y. Times followed up Saturday. Local police, the Times reported, believe it’s unlikely Rep. Cantor was targeted. They said the “bullet was probably not aimed at his office.”

The Journal didn’t publish that, either.

Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal continued its war on health care reform in an editorial with this amazing sentence:
“The legislation continues to be unpopular, no doubt made more so by the backroom deals and sleight of hand used to get it passed and Republicans are certain to take advantage of the low approval numbers leading into November.”
What gall!
I don’t mean the boilerplate rhetoric. No, I refer to the nerve of the GOP partisans who operate the Journal writing about “Republicans” as if “Republicans” were somebody else.
It would be honest to say, “we.”
But therein lies a problem for me.
Here’s why. After keeping the business solvent, the Journal’s major purpose is to promote one of our major political parties. It does so by means fair and foul. When I point that out, it’s easy for you and other readers to presume that I’m siding with the other party.
I’m not.
I have come to believe that thinking in “party” terms is mistaken. Neither party is autonomous. And, deep down, they share a lot. As leftists have long known (and some tea partiers recognize), both bend to corporate power.
(That’s why the Journal’s editorial partisans don’t write that Pete Domenici – patron saint of corporate welfare – could love the Democratic health reform. The pharmaceutical and hospital industries found it so comforting, they backed it. As did the AMA. And the “reform” leaves private health insurance in place to find new paths to profit.)
I know that it’s my job to aim darts and laurels at the Journal’s journalism. So like any beat reporter, I use my biases as reminders to be fair.
Of course, keeping my eye on the journalism ball permits – no, it demands – that I clobber Journal management for infecting the news with partisanship.
That’s exactly what the Journal did last week when reporting how verbal threats and violence were aimed at Democratic legislators who voted for the health reform bills.
It’s complex, this interweaving of politics and journalism -unraveling it requires very, very careful exposition.
Which exposition, I will save for a post later this week.

Ah, the beloved trends piece. Like the time-honored weather story and the local candidate Q & A, it is but one of many mandatory products that fill the pages of a daily newspaper.

Even though most people tend to go elsewhere for entertainment news now, local newspapers still include trends stories as one of those things they think they need to keep readers happy.

And I say this as a former trends reporter who was constantly on the lookout for a valid story – and was very happy whenever I found one I thought truly resonated.

At their best, trends stories can highlight something new that people are doing…maybe in a distant city, or maybe right in the area. When done right, a trends story can inform readers about a legitimate societal or cultural trend that affects or could affect readers’ lives.

When a trends reporter uncovers a trend that intersects with an actual breaking story or news hook, he or she usually has a real winner.

But when they’re not researched well, trends stories can end up looking suspicious, forced, or just plain bogus. Inside the journalism industry, such bogus trend stories are tracked with vigor and glee.

I think that’s the case with the trends story that ran with the Journal’s health care coverage on March 29.

“Youths Cling to Parents in More Ways Than Before,” reads the story, which appears alongside two negatively-cast news stories on the recently-passed health care overhaul. (Sorry, I cannot locate the link on the paper’s website…you are on your own!)

The story, by Washington Post writer Ian Shapira, begins with the tale of a 22-year old whose parents regularly make dinner for her and prepare her taxes.

“Soon, thanks to the health care reform act President Obama signed into law Tuesday, (the 22-year-old) can piggyback on her parents in one more way: as a dependent on her mother’s health plan.”

That characterization seems a little bit judgmental – of the 22-year old, if nothing else.

The story continues, in the writer’s voice:

“In its bureaucratic way, the government’s restructuring of health care sets a new starting point for independent adulthood: no longer at age 18 or 21, but deep into the 20’s.”

Whoa! Now that’s way judgmental – not to mention extremely hyperbolic.

So the writer believes the fact that government health care is now available to 26-years olds through their parents plans means we have now redefined the age of adulthood in America? That’s a pretty heavy claim to toss out unchallenged – especially in a trends story!

And how about acknowledging the whole logic behind extending health care to 26 year olds? It wasn’t to make depending on mummy and daddy easier  for pampered, perfectly-healthy adults, as the writer would seem to want us to believe.  It was to provide continuing medical care to young adults who, in many cases, were desperately, chronically ill and not eligible for other care. If you attended any of the Medicaid hearings last December in New Mexico (I did, and it was sad) or even just paid minimal attention to the battle over health care and what it was about, you’d know that.

And another critically important intent  behind extending parental coverage was to lower costs for everyone by allowing a large pool of largely healthy young adults into the insurance pools. But we didn’t read anything about that, either.

Later on, the story quotes a social scientist who remarks that 20-somethings are more indeed more dependent on their parents than any previous American generation.

But neither the social scientist – nor anyone else interviewed in this health care trend story, except the writer and the 22-year-old – says a single word about health care.

Many times over the past months, my Journal Watch colleagues have noted that the Journal’s editorials, guest columns and news stories are rabidly slanted against health care reform.

I guess readers should also know that the Journal’s bias extends to running bogus trends stories as well.

I don’t know much about astrology, but I read once that Aries like me hate details or can’t deal with them. Deciders at the Albuquerque Journal don‘t suffer from my defect. Not content with big, front-page distortions and big omissions, the partisans in power habitually impose tiny tweaks to further their cause.

Take, for example, the headline on liberal E.J. Dionne Jr.’s column celebrating President Obama’s victory on health care today (Tuesday, March 23).

The headline ignored Dionne’s lead, “Yes, we did.” It skipped past his next point (Washington has changed), his next (Congress is capable of fundamental social reform) and his next (Democrats can govern) and, in fact, ignored almost the entire piece – 14 paragraphs worth.

But three paragraphs from the end, Dionne arrived at partisanship versus bipartisanship. He said the President tried to reach across party lines, met with implacable opposition and then, “came out fighting.”

Here’s what the Journal’s headline writer put above the column:

“Partisanship Gets the Job Done.”

This probably was intended to draw approving nods from the party faithful, but I like it, too – it’s another piece of evidence that Journal management lacks decency. Perhaps astrologers can explain why.

This doesn’t mean the editors won’t wield bold strokes in their pursuit of partisan ends – as they did Friday by not reporting a story.

As I mentioned parenthetically in my last post, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported the current health legislation would reduce deficits by $138 billion in the first 10 years.

Parenthetically, because it broke as I was writing my comment; I read it first in a New York Times.com alert Thursday at 9:49 AM Eastern.

For Friday morning, the Times wrapped the CBO development in a larger takeout on the impending vote. The Washington Post did likewise.

And the Albuquerque Journal, how did it treat the CBO news? It didn’t.

There was no discrete CBO estimate story. And there was no health care vote story incorporating the development.

It is true the Journal’s front page AP report said (in the jump, page two) the bill would “trim federal deficits by an estimated $138 billion over the next decade.” No mention of the source. No hint that the figure was new.

I guess it wasn’t noteworthy.

The Journal cited the CBO in an editorial but left out the deficit reducing number, $138 billion.

Finally, in an Op Ed on the next page, Dr. J. Deane Waldman, identified as a UNM professor in both Health Sciences and Anderson Schools of Management, opined the bill is going to add a trillion dollars to the deficit. He offered no source.

Now the CBO produces estimates and projections, so its numbers may be off. But last year, when the CBO estimated a health reform scheme produced by Senate Democrats would cost lots more than they foresaw, the Journal ran the story on page one. Hmmm.

It’s so easy to identify the criteria by which the Journal decides which CBO reports deserve the front page and which do not. Also, which stories to print and which to ignore.

And, to return to where we began, it’s a snap distinguishing which columns get headlines respecting the content and for which columns the headline writers skew the rubrics.

Wrong again!

I believed the Albuquerque Journal’s political campaign against health care reform – in its “news” pages as well as Op Eds and editorials – could not become more blatant.

Silly me.

Here’s the big headline on the front page Thursday, March 18:

“Premiums Likely to Go Higher”.

Over that is a rubric in red identifying the piece as a “Health Care Fact Check”.

The sub-head reads, “But Tax Credits Would Help Millions Pay Insurance Cost”.

The story by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press’s Washington Bureau opens this way: “Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.”

Despite that lead, the story is not as biased against health reform as you would expect from AP Washington (where reporters routinely editorialize) and from the Journal (whose editors routinely use AP’s corrupted product for partisan purposes).

It says, basically, that the reform may slow the rise of premiums but is unlikely to reverse that trend.

Hmm. Slowing the rise of premiums would be bad? As for lowering them in the short-term, does anybody know how to do that except by wiping out the health insurance industry?

(Later Thursday, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the health legislation would reduce deficits by $138 billion in the first 10 years, thanks to reductions in the growth of Medicare spending, new fees and tax increases. That might mean lower premiums long-term.)

In sum, the Journal pulled off a neat trick Thursday – adorning page one with a headline about rising premiums, intimating that the reform should be blamed and that the President is selling us a bill of goods.

How neat the trick is better understood when you turn to the last page of the first section and find – gosh! – a hard news story on the health bill. It gained ”fresh traction” backed by a Democrat who prefers universal, single-payer insurance and a national organization of Roman Catholic nuns.

Must have been happenstance that the editors put a negative headline over a “Fact Check” on page one and relegated the positive hard news to A10.

Coincidence also must explain why the Journal editorial on health reform Wednesday tracked the talking points of a national party.

I rarely draw your attention to Journal editorials. After all, the publisher has every right to state his views there. And the newspaper publishes many (usually local) editorials that are well researched and argued.

But editorials aren’t exempt from standards of decency and accuracy.

So it’s worth noting that Wednesday’s Journal editorial says, near the top, 68 percent of Americans don’t think the plan coming up for a vote is the right plan.

How ugly is that? Let me count the ways.

First, it’s cherry picking; other surveys show three-quarters of Americans want this plan or something close. And majorities approve various elements within the larger scheme.

Secondly, the Journal is brandishing polls after a year of extraordinary bumbling by White House advocates of reform; after we, the people, watched the Congress make sausage and after opponents lied about reform, then lied some more. Death panels, anyone?

That anybody still supports this reform is astonishing.

Finally, the Journal makes this argument – that most Americans don’t want the reform – after running its own, unrelenting, tawdry campaign against it in the news pages! (Win Quigley’s fair reporting and opining were exceptions to the rule.)

This degree of cynicism is such that I would disbelieve it if I hadn’t been eyeballing the evidence daily.

The editorial, incidentally, doesn’t improve. It says the Senate plan, “essentially raids Medicare, when that program itself needs propping up, to fund Medicaid.”

A newspaper opposed to Medicare (except when fellow partisans add a costly benefit without paying for it) now pretends to defend Medicare.

But that ploy comes straight from the playbook of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Please read the editorial and show me where it does not follow his lead.

Failing that, take my word that the remainder maintains its initial ethical standard.

The editorial ends:

“Doing it without a roll call vote is obscene.”

Obscenity is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. I might apply the term to a management that wields its newspaper for partisan purposes – and pretends otherwise.

It seems almost too easy to criticize the Albuquerque Journal for running yet another Marita K. Noon column, because we’ve pointed out her errors,  simplistic assertions and lack of expert credentials in the past.

But the Journal’s Op-Ed (opposite editorial) page carries her again today, this time with a convoluted essay headlined “Carbon Tax Honest; Cap and Trade Isn’t” (subscription required), which leads with an unsubstantiated anecdote about health care.

I won’t even attempt to sort out her stream of attempted logic, other than to point out some of the column’s myriad unsubstantiated claims. It’s another example of a column thrown at the public without any kind of vetting, fact-checking or even editing.

Some of the assertions from her column:

Those responsible for getting the hospitals paid for the services acknowledge that getting money from the private insurance companies is much easier than from the companies getting funded through government.

Never mind the mangled English, who is saying this? Noon doesn’t say.

How does this connect to cap and trade?

She answers with:

First, understand that cap and trade is a government plan to deal with so-called man-made global warming.

Love that use of “so-called,” and then she asserts:

While the entire climate change issue is challenged due to the acknowledged data forgeries and plummeting public concern over climate, governments are still moving forward with cap and trade plans.

With this sentence, she asserts that the entire issue is challenged, and offers as evidence unsubstantiated “acknowledged” information, this time in the form of “data forgeries”. And then she declares public concern over climate is “plummeting.” If that’s true, why do climate stories run on the news and Op Ed pages nearly every day?

In fact, just the day before, The Sunday Journal ran a column by a Santa Fe writer whose credentials include a post-graduate degree in climate change and carbon management. In it, Mark Giorgetti asserts that a disinformation campaign is being put out by “promoters of the fossil fuel industries and unregulated corporate expansion.” He doesn’t name them, but this is an apt description of CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy of which Noon is executive director, which claims to support citizens’ rights but is an unabashed supporter of extractive industries like oil and gas.

Unfortunately, the way the Journal packaged Giorgetti’s column can leave the erroneous impression its content comes from yet another climate change naysayer.

The headline, “Climate Controversy a Hoax,” technically is an accurate reflection of Giorgetti’s position (it’s the controversy that’s a hoax, not the science). But those who scan headlines could interpret it to mean climate change is a hoax. And to further cement that impression, the column ran with a cartoon showing a dinosaur holding up a sign that says “Climate Change is a Hoax.” Again, the cartoon actually supports what the column says – the dinosaur who holds up the “hoax” sign is calmly standing while his frightened fellow dinosaurs run to escape the obvious change in their midst: an erupting volcano.

Considering Girogetti’s credentials, his take on global warming deserves to be read, but likely will be dismissed as yet another of the unsubstantiated, agenda-driven opinions the Journal runs with annoying frequency, such as those written by Noon.

Giorgetti makes the case that yes, it does snow even in times of global warming, and says those denying climate change have an agenda – to block movement toward a clean energy economy in order to preserve that of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, Noon, a so-called expert on climate change, helpfully offers that if there is climate change, “there is nothing humans can do to change what has been going on for millions of years,” so why inconvenience the oil and gas industry with cap and trade and other regulations?

In conclusion, she says cap and trade is nothing more than a tax, so:

. . . support the idea of a carbon tax. It is more honest. And no one wants more taxes.

Simplistic? Yes.

Honest? Not even the Journal seems to know what that means anymore.

Former Albuquerque Mayor Jim Baca has an interesting New Year’s proposition for his blog readers: Come up with a derogatory name for the Albuquerque Journal. And don’t send him “Albuquerque Urinal” as a suggestion, he says, because it’s been done before. (It certainly has.)

His rationale for dissing the state’s leading newspaper is Thom Cole’s UpFront column suggestion (Saturday, Jan. 2, subscription required) that readers come up with derogatory catch-phrases for New Mexico in light of the number of state officials tainted by corruption this past year. I tend to agree with Baca that – even though it’s meant tongue in cheek – it’s not a good idea, and that one of the less-than-flattering names might “stick” in people’s minds.

Yet, the state that would rather be known as the Land of Enchantment has survived past derogatory sayings that were based on scandals and (literally) other plagues. Two of these sayings ended up on T-shirts. “Land of Entrapment” showed up after more than one high-profile criminal case revealed innocent men on the state’s death row. And “Land of the Flea, Home of the Plague” seemed appropriate when residents discovered the bubonic variety had not only survived the Dark Ages but was being carried by fleas in our high desert. (This was before learning we could also contract hantavirus, swine flu and West Nile.)

Who knows? Cole’s proposition might yield some clever results. He’s primed the suggestion pump with “The Pay-to-Play State”, and the column’s headline — “Louisiana Without the Humidity” – essentially is another suggestion.

Baca’s proposition might yield some clever names, too. But while it would be hard to top (or in this case, go lower) than the aforementioned derogatory moniker for the Journal, the whole name-calling thing exemplifies how such labeling dismisses the good work that is done at the paper, just as “Pay to Play” ignores the enchanting aspects of the state.

And because we’ve mostly chronicled the missteps of the Journal this past year at ABQJournalWatch.com, it’s only fair to focus on the good stuff in this post as I look back on 2009.

On the positive side of the ledger, I’ve noticed more stories related to Mexico in recent weeks, including wire dispatches like the Associated Press comparison of two cities – El Paso and its besieged neighbor, Juarez – which ran Dec 26, and Sunday’s look by Rene Romo at the last two years of violence in the border town of Palomas.

Although they seem to play catch-up with Heath Haussamen’s NM Politics.net a lot (profiles of the four GOP candidates in Sunday’s Journal a month after Haussamen’s is an example ), Sean Olson and Dan McKay deserve notice for their ongoing political coverage and Politics Notebook. When the Denny’s shooting on the West Side in June raised the hackles of Republicans who criticized what some consider a lenient city driver’s licensing policy, Olson followed up a day later with a report that the “immigrant-friendly” policy in question, signed into law in 2001, had been drafted by a Republican. And in September, McKay did a good job looking into the lobbying connections of the managers behind city election candidates.

Other things I liked (and there’s no way to list them all), include John Robertson’s look back on the “kinder” political times when Bruce King was governor (UpFront Dec. 30) and Jackie Jadrnak remembering the King administration as a way of illustrating that yes, there once was a time when journalists could talk directly to government experts to get the information readers need, back before the omnipresent firewalls of request procedures and press handlers.

My colleague Tracy Dingmann has justifiably lauded science writer John Fleck, and I concur, always finding solid, interesting reporting in his dispatches on water, global warming and other topics. Worthy of individual mention is his devastating account of the death of his sister-in-law, found in her California desert home surrounded by empty asthma inhalers, a testament to her status as one of the uninsured chronically ill. Fleck wrote:

I’ve struggled with ways of getting across 18,000 preventable deaths per year. It is a 9/11 attack every two months, year in and year out. It is a passenger airliner crashing every four days.

Ultimately, I can’t quantify it either, beyond my family’s single sad story. But it is reasonable to think that if Ginnie had access to consistent health care, she would be alive today, and would be a productive member of society.

We miss her very much.

Another stunner was Joline Gutierrez Krueger’s UpFront story about a 30-year-old Albuquerque mother of three who was denied insurance coverage for a drug she found helpful in dealing with fatal scleroderma. That insurance decision was reversed seven weeks later, a decision no doubt related to the story and outrage it generated, despite what could be construed as downplaying that by  insurance plan officials in Krueger’s follow-up.

Which brings me to the Journal’s health care coverage in general. After a slow start getting into the debate (and some bone-headed editorials), the Journal worked to be informative with a Question and Answer feature that appeared every day for a month. Launched Aug. 9 in tandem with a column-plea from Journal Washington Bureau correspondent Michael Coleman for citizen civility (others, including Quigley and UpFront columnist Leslie Linthicum chimed in with the same message at other times), it let the public ask questions and left the answers to Coleman and business reporter Winthrop Quigley, the latter of whom without question carried most of the burden of covering the implications of the various incarnations of health care legislation considered in Congress over subsequent months.

The Q&As covered everything from clarifying the rumor that euthanasia was a part of the bills to why tort reform wasn’t part of the discussion, and Quigley supplemented this with even more information on his blog. I can’t begin to estimate how many columns and news articles Quigley produced, covering all aspects of the health care debate and its affects, yet he still found time to produce full reportage on Congress’ attempts at financial reform, the effects of tightened loan standards on small businesses starved for new financing and other business news.

And he found time to muse about democracy, overuse of the word “Nazi” and a looming tax debate that Quigley says, “absent some political maturity” . . . “will resemble a schoolyard brawl.”

And that’s without mentioning his thoughtful look at the echoes of Vietnam in his piece on the occasion of Robert McNamara’s death in July and his response to continued trouble in Afghanistan in November.

Or pointing out his matter-of-fact and compelling end-of-life-care column based on his own experience with his mother.

To top it off, on Dec. 28 he had the banner story on the front page, headlined “Does Rio Rancho Need 2 More Hospitals?”  – a question, believe it or not, that had just come up for me personally in conversations with  landowners feeling the brunt of higher taxes in Sandoval County.

Other columnists and reporters shone in 2009, but in my view, it was Quigley’s year.

Gwyneth Doland and Matt Reichbach of the New Mexico Independent took the Albuquerque Journal to task for Monday’s story and poll on which national issues New Mexicans feel are most important today.

The poll was done for the Journal by Research & Polling, Inc., an experienced and respected local firm that the Journal has used for years when surveying New Mexicans on issues of local and national import.

However, in their post “Journal Poll Violates Two of Nate Silver’s Five Sins of Health Care Polling,”Doland and Reichbach highlight a serious problem with the Journal’s story — the wording of a key question in the poll.

The Journal story trumpets the notion that, based on the poll, nearly half of registered New Mexican voters don’t want a government-run public health insurance option.  But the actual wording of the poll question renders that statement unreliable.

Here’s the Journal’s poll question:

“Do you favor or oppose creating a public health care plan run by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies?”

The results were 49 percent opposed, 42 percent in favor, with 9 percent saying it would depend or they didn’t know.

Now I’m not an expert on polling – but Nate Silver of the celebrated polling blog FiveThirtyEight.com is.

As Doland and Reichbach note:

“…in a post called  “How to Poll on the Public Option,” Nate Silver of the polling blog FiveThirtyEight writes that polls that do not use the word “option” to indicate that any plan with a public option would offer a choice between a public plan and private plans tend to have lower results for support of the public option.

The Journal poll used “public health care plan” in the poll question, but not the word “option.” However, the headline for the story did use the missing “O” word, enlisting it to proclaim that the poll had concluded — “Public Option Tough Sell in N.M.”

Doland and Reichbach continue:

Instead, Silver praised a Quinnipiac poll that asked, “Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?”

As he writes:

This is a perfect question. It makes clear that the public option is an insurance program, rather than a program to provide health care services. It uses the less ambiguous phrase “government” rather than the more ambiguous phrase “public”. It makes clear that the public option is a choice. It avoids leading the respondent by comparing the public option to Medicare. And it asks in unambiguous terms whether the respondent supports or opposes the proposal.

62 percent of people support the public option in Quinnipiac’s August 5th poll, versus 32 percent opposed.

In addition, Silver says a good question makes clear that the ‘public option’ “refers unambiguously to a type of health insurance, and not the actual provision of health care services by the government.”

As an example, he cites a poll that uses the same wording as the Journal:

In general, this is a concept that a lot of people seem to be unnecessarily confused by (although I suspect that a lot of the “confusion” is deliberate). The recent NBC/WSJ poll gets this wrong, referring to a “public health care plan” rather than a “public health insurance plan”. So does this Rasmussen poll, which refers to a “public health insurance company.”

Read Silver’s whole post – he’s the expert. Long story short – The Journal’s story, based on a faulty poll question,  simply contributes to all the misinformation surrounding healthcare reform  – and that’s a real shame.