I want to see truth in our media. I fully support free speech, but I do not support the spread of deception and propaganda. To the contrary, I will stand up and speak against it whenever I see it. I will not stand by while my friends, family, and community members are deceived. We need a greater standard of truth in this country. We have let the media run amok, promoting thinly defensible ‘facts’ as truth. I say no more! It is time to demand better!
This is the story of what finally motivated me to speak up and take action:
Saturday night, while watching TV with my parents, I saw an ad that was placed by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF.org). Everything about the ad seemed wrong. So wrong that it inspired me to do some online research into both the organization and into the ‘facts’ that they listed. What I found was more shocking that I had anticipated.
Who is IWF?
It turns out that IWF is a group that, according to legal momentum, is anti-feminist. Oddly, its chiefly staffed by women. You can read legal momentum’s view on the IWF here:
http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/sfr/independent-womens-forum.html
Legal Momentum has close association to the National Organization for Women (NOW).
What was their deception?
In the ad, they focus on the issue of breast cancer treatment and survival rates and the main fraud is that they infer their own statistic and attribute it to the American Cancer Society. FactCheck.org reports that the American Cancer Society has disavowed that claim:
http://factcheck.org/2009/09/a-false-appeal-to-womens-fears/
You’ll notice that the article posted at FactCheck.org is cited with actual comments from staff at the American Cancer Society. I wonder if IWF ever thought to contact those individuals before making their claims? Then there is the use of the breast cancer survival rate of England as a metric for determing the quality of future post-reform cancer care in the US. The flaws in that logic are descibed fully (with citations) in an article from the Seminal Blog at FiredogLake.com:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7278
Lastly, the ad cites the now infamous Lewin Group as “experts” in health insurance. The Lewin Group is well known as an organization that is owned by one of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealth Group. Why would we trust statistics on the outcome of health insurance reform to be provided by ‘experts’ that are working for a health insurance company? I think that the conflicts of interest there are too great in order to make their findings realiable or objective.