If you read past the Sotomayor headlines in your newspaper today you may have discovered that the House of Representatives unleashed their health care reform proposal yesterday.

Did the headline you saw color your reaction to the bill or influence your decision to read on?

Most major media outlets worked hard to provide well-rounded and comprehensive reports on the House health care reform plan published yesterday – but the devil is still in the details, and those details start at the top – the headline treatment.

Did the bill tax “the rich,” “millionaires” or “the wealthy” – the distinction is not irrelevant.  Most Americans would probably like to be wealthy, or even perhaps rich. We sympathize with those we would like to emulate.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) told the Washington Post that even families not ranking in the top 1 percent of earners “hope they’re going to be there someday,” he said. “So they don’t necessarily think it’s fair.”

But millionaires are a “them” another group of people who can be distanced from the average person. We may want to be a millionaire, but for most, especially liberals, that desire carries a certain amount of guilty pleasure.

So who uses which term?

“Wealthy” took the day, appearing in headlines by CNN and the Washington Post as well as the more conservative leaning Washington Examiner (in an AP rewrite) and Washington Times, as a subhead.

The “rich” were the tax target in USA Today, McClatchy’s Miami Herald, and the Washington Times, which also threw in “near-rich” just to cover all the bases.

CBS used Millionaires in its forgettable report – light on both facts and perspective – and the LA Times’ headline did not name the victim.

Others, like the Wall Street Journal chose to focus on small business instead.

Most Americans are likely sympathetic to small business – the engine of our economy – and the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep, making small businesses more sympathetic than “millionaires.”

What does all this mean?

Ask any pollster.

Language is important in national debates – as evidenced by a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that showed support for health care reform swung by a hefty 40 percentage points depending on which details were attached.

Tags: CBS, CNN, health care reform, House Bill, LA Times, McClatchy, Miami Herald, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, Washington Post, Washington Times

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 8:05 am and is filed under Eye on the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.