As the debate over health reform becomes more and more focused on issues of “health care cost containment,” Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com raises a crucial and much-ignored question: whose costs are we talking about here?

When Americans tell pollsters they want health care reform to focus on “costs” they usually mean their actual, out-of-pocket health care expenses: insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, the costs of prescription drugs and any other medical bills not covered by health insurance.

That’s not the same, of course, as what CBO or health policy wonks mean by “costs,” which is typically either the federal government’s outlays or the overall rate of inflation in the health care sector.
Blumenthal also notes that a rare poll focused on the kind of cost containment regular folks want shows some pretty amazing levels of support from Ds and Rs alike:

The survey…sponsored by the labor-business coalition known as America’s Agenda, included a test of measures to “reduce costs” that speaks directly to these kinds of out-of-pocket expenses:
Now I would like to read you a proposal that is being considered to reform health care. This proposal aims to reduce costs and improve quality of health care in the following ways: make health coverage more affordable and accessible for all Americans; eliminate co-pays and deductibles for recommended chronic disease treatment prescribed by your doctor; eliminate co- pays and deductibles for recommended preventive services and emphasize disease prevention including reducing obesity and smoking; ensure that doctors have accurate and updated information on the most effective treatments; and ensure that patients receive highly-coordinated, personalized treatment plans based on the latest medical evidence.
While the America’s Agenda poll did not test this proposal against alternatives, I would not be surprised to see Americans with health insurance react more positively to it than anything else we could dream up, especially if the alternative is framed in terms of providing “access” to those presently uninsured (in other words, to somebody else).

All these elements–particularly an emphasis on prevention, chronic disease management, electronic medical records, and research on effective treatments–have been part of what Barack Obama has meant by “cost containment” in the past, even if they haven’t much appeared in congressional plans. Looks like it would be a very good time for Obama to shift attention back to these highly popular forms of cost containment right now.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Only six months into the Obama presidency, the new administration has already experienced an unusually robust assortment of criticism from fellow Democrats, at least at the elite opinion-leading and activist level. The extended progressive “honeymoon” that John Judis warned against back in February has largely faded.
Obama has been faulted in large swaths of the blogosphere and op-ed pages for a wide array of missteps, if not downright heresies. Here are just a few:
*Undertaking expensive and questionably effective “bailouts” of the financial sector instead of simply regulating and/or nationalizing it.
*Using vast political capital to promote a fiscal stimulus package that was too small to work, and allowing Senate “centrists” to water it down even further.
*Refusing to reverse major elements of the Bush program for surveillance, detention, and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and obstructing efforts to hold Bush officials accountable for violations of civil liberties.
*Moving too slowly to end American military involvement in Iraq, and moving too fast to make new commitments for military action in Afghanistan.
*Deferring to “centrists” and even Republicans in Congress on crucial climate change and health reform legislation at the palpable risk of destroying the progressive nature of these initiatives.
*Failing to honor commitments for immediate action to promote GLBT equality, particularly with respect to the military.
Aside from these specific issues, there’s been a pervasive feeling in many progressive circles that Obama is too cautious, too “pragmatic,” too subservient to Democratic “centrists,” too worried about bipartisanship, too interested in outreach to people who will never support him, and too unwilling to utilize the bully pulpit to articulate and defend progressive principles.
But lefty unhappiness with Obama has another, and very poignant, dimension: a recognition that, despite helping to elect one of the most liberal presidents in recent memory, self-conscious progressives have less leverage with the administration than their “centrist” Democratic counterparts, and maybe no more than Republicans (or at least those few Republicans in the Senate willing to even consider cooperation with Obama’s agenda).
The reason is that efforts to create a “loyal opposition” to Obama from the left tend to be more “loyal” than “oppositional.” In a characteristically acerbic column about the Campaign for America’s Future annual meeting last month, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made these observations about the gap between progressive criticism of Obama and the willingness to take him on in meaningful (i.e., threatening) ways:

[S]peakers at the closing session exhorted the liberals to take back America–from Obama. “The president of the most powerful country in the world is doing all right, but there are a lot of people in this country who are not doing all right,” writer Naomi Klein told the crowd. “Obama is making us stupid,” she added. “Love can make you stupid.”
… But many in the audience had warmer feelings toward the Obama administration. A straw poll taken by pollster Stan Greenberg found that 90 percent of those in attendance approve of the job the president is doing, and that they have no consensus about whether to help Obama or fight him.

More interesting than Milbank’s mockery was the fact that influential progressive blogger Jane Hamsher agreed with it, saying that leading progressive groups are “little more than arms of the White House now playing a zero sum game with Republicans who really don’t matter.”
The same dynamic is evident with grassroots elements of the “Democratic base.” Even as Obama’s job approval rating has bounced around, with Republicans hardening their opposition and (according to a few polls) independents becoming skeptical, self-identified Democrats have remained solidly in his corner. And then there’s this stunning detail: According to Gallup’s weekly tracking poll, Obama’s job approval rating among self-identified “liberal Democrats” has risen from 90 percent on the week of his inauguration to 96 percent in the latest (the week ending July 12) survey. So while progressive criticism of Obama is hitting a fever pitch, it doesn’t seem to have affected their love affair with him.
The frustration of the progressive left was perfectly expressed last week by Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, a web site specifically created to push the progressive blogosphere from a purely partisan to a more explicitly ideological posture. The post is a pretty remarkable admission of futility, arguing that progressives can’t credibly threaten to derail Obama’s agenda, since an Obama failure will be seen as their failure as well:

Whether or not the Democratic trifecta actually passes progressive legislation, the legislation that is passed and the policies that are followed will still be perceived as progressive. We simply can’t avoid that.
For example, right now the stimulus package pretty much equals left-wing economic philosophy in the eyes of the American people. If it doesn’t produce results, we are all going to see our ideas become discredited in the eyes of the American public, even if we thought policies of the Democratic trifecta did not go nearly far enough. The country is never going to say “well, that idea didn’t work, so let’s try a more extreme version of it.” People just don’t think that way in America.
Many conservatives felt the same way under the Republican trifecta, and are now roundly mocked for arguing that conservatism can’t fail, but people can fail conservatism. I imagine that if the economy doesn’t turn around, many progressives will sound quite similar in their critiques of the Obama administration. Problem is, we will sound just as silly as they will. Whether we like it or not, progressivism is on the hook for the success or failure of the policies passed under the Obama administration and the Democratic trifecta.

With this realization comes the equally frustrated feeling that Blue Dogs and other Democratic “centrists” have superior leverage over the administration and the Democratic congressional leadership, precisely because they (or at least those in their ranks from districts and states either carried by John McCain or narrowly carried by Obama) don’t view their political viability as inseparable from the president and the party. Thus they can make credible threats to take a dive on key elements of the Democratic agenda if their demands are not met.
Some liberal groups have been tentatively moving towards a more aggressive posture, most notably in the context of a campaign to push back against “centrist” Democratic and Republican demands for abandonment or significant modification of a strong “public option” in a competitive universal health care system. After being targeted by MoveOn for her opposition to the public option, Senator Kay Hagan came around promptly. And progressives are reasonably optimistic about similar efforts aimed at Dianne Feinstein, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln. Moreover, broader threats from Democratic senators to defect from support for the administration were credited by some with causing Harry Reid’s recent instruction to Max Baucus to stop screwing around with the public option in health care reform in order to pursue Republican support.
Still, it’s not clear how far any progressive Democrats will go in bucking the White House. Despite significant pressure to vote against the final House version of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, which had been significantly modified to gain the votes of rural (and often Blue Dog) members, a revolt from the left on the floor fizzled out (with Al Gore reportedly whipping the Progressive Caucus). A similar revolt on the vote to appropriate funds for Iraq and Afghanistan also failed to strike paydirt.
The left’s leverage with the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership is thus limited both by loyalty and by the possibility of being held accountable for the failure of Obama’s agenda. This “loyal opposition” to Obama is being forced to watch more-or-less helplessly as the game of chicken between Obama and the “centrists” plays out.
The abiding reality for all Democrats is that the power of the President of the United States to define his own party in this day and age may well be nearly limitless. This doesn’t mean intra-party criticism ought to end. But it does mean that this president’s success will largely define the success of the Democratic Party for years to come.

The continuing Republican criticisms of Obama as being “weak” and “apologizing to everybody” instead of being “strong” and “resolute” present these kinds of dichotomies as if they were abstract moral options between which Obama – and America – were completely free to choose. But the reality is that behind the abstract political rhetoric of terms like “strength” and “weakness” there is always the more practical level of military reality and the military strategies that can be based on it.
All of George Bush’s goals, threats, promises, language and rhetoric regarding the Arab-Persian world, for example, were not simply expressions of certain abstract moral values in which he just happened to believe but were firmly rooted in a very specific military analysis and strategy – a strategy that had been developed in the 1990s after the first invasion of Iraq. The basic premise of this strategy was that with the extraordinary military technology America had developed – known under the general rubric of the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” — America – in alliance with Israel — could militarily dominate the Middle East.
Looking at maps after the 1991 invasion of Iraq and considering the weak defense Saddam had mounted (US tanks had come within 70 miles of Bagdad, after all) these strategists concluded that by invading Iraq, converting it into a pro-US ally and setting up major military bases there we could obtain a central and decisive strategic position in the region. An invasion and pacification of Iraq would allow us to establish major American air, armor and infantry forces directly on Iran’s border and simultaneously threaten Syria and Jordan from the rear. This would severely weaken the main lines of communication and supply from Iran to the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories. In a domino effect, Israel would then find both Hezbollah and Hamas much more isolated and easier to control. Taken together, this would result in a combined US-Israeli military dominance of the region so powerful that it would allow us to then profoundly intimidate Iran and any other anti-US forces.
Two major corollaries followed from this basic military strategy. First, America had no real need for European or international allies (other than as window dressing) and second, America did not need to seek popular support in Muslim world. Military force by itself would be sufficient to achieve all our objectives. A massive network of U.S. air and land force bases in Iraq would serve as a permanent staging area for the fast and overwhelming projection of US military power and influence across the region while the dramatic success of the political and economic system we would install in Iraq would inspire Muslims to follow the U.S. example.
9/11 provided the opportunity to put this strategy into effect. From that time all of the rhetorical and political stances Bush took – and which Republicans continue to advocate today – were based on this underlying military analysis and military strategy.
Unfortunately, as all Americans are now painfully aware, from a purely military point of view, this strategy simply did not work.

Read more…

This item by Mike Lux is a cross-post from OpenLeft, representing an important point of view on health care reform and party loyalty.
It was good to see President Obama shifting toward a more directly confrontational tone with the insurance industry today in his weekly radio/YouTube address on health care. One of the biggest mistakes Clinton made in the last fight was shying away from directly taking on the insurance companies standing in the way until it was too late. It is only this kind of directly populist message that will carry us home.
It was also very exciting to see Obama be very clear and the strongest yet about how much he wants the public option.
We have reached a crucial moment, perhaps the crucial moment. All those folks pushing for delay (with the possible exception of Ron Wyden) are pushing for delay because they don’t want to take on the insurance industry, and they want to slow the momentum of the Obama approach, especially the public option. Now is when Democrats and all of us progressive activists on the outside need to get very tough and very specific. Conservative Democratic Senators need to understand that they need to vote for cloture even if they can’t bring themselves to vote for the bill itself, that to break with Obama and the party on this is the ultimate disloyalty. They need to understand that the White House, and Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi will cut them off at the knees on all future requests. They need to understand that progressives will recruit primary candidates against anyone who stops health care reform, and that progressive donors will stop giving to anyone who helps the Republicans on a filibuster fight.
This is the biggest issue for Barack Obama, and his ability to get anything else significant done will die if health care dies. This is the ultimate measure of whether you are part of the team, and the consequences of defeat on health care need to be made clear- yes, crystal clear- to everyone. All of us in this fight- from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, to all of us who are progressive activists- need to ratchet up the pressure even more than the insurance company lobbyists. This is our hill to die on.

One of the odder political phenomena of 2009 has been the strength of the neo-Hooverite argument that the most appropriate response to the deepest recession since the 1930s is radical retrenchment of public spending policies to mitigate (or, at the state and local level, avoid) deficits. Most Republicans and some Democrats have embraced the rhetoric of hard-core fiscal hawkery, with particularly tough words for those state and local governments who have suddenly, through no particular fault of their own, watched revenues drop through the floor.
Well, the fiscal hawks ought to be enjoying the latest news from California, where Republican manipulation of a two-thirds-vote requirement for enactment of a state budget has led to a no-tax-increase deal to close an astounding $26 billion state shortfall.
The deal does have a revenue component that manages to take money out of California’s economy without actually increasing the state’s revenue base: it will increase and speed up tax withholding, and exploit an arcane provision related to Prop 13 that enables the state to borrow (to the tune of $1.9 billion) property tax dollars from local governments, who will in turn, of course, be forced to cut their own spending.
The spending side of the deal includes $1.2 billion in unspecified cuts to prison expenditures–virtually guaranteed to force early release of prisoners, a practice that earlier led to public demands, in California and elsewhere, for mandatory sentencing rules and restrictions on parole and probation.
But the crown jewel of the spending cuts in the California budget deal is the continuation and extension of furloughs for public employees that amount to a 14% pay cut. This isn’t exactly great news for California businesses that will feel the impact of reduced consumer spending by state employees.
Given the Golden State’s size, there’s no question the budget deal (if, indeed, it secures legislative approval) will represent a significant blow to national economic recovery. But it will undoubtedly please those for whom public spending is the villain, and “sacrifice” in every area other than taxes is the panacea.

Snarko-phile Alert: Don’t miss Dana Milbank’s column, “Health Care for Dummies,” in today’s WaPo. Milbank provides a devastating recap of RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s Monday speech to the Washington Press Club, which included verbatim passages lifted from a memo distributed earlier this month by GOP message wizard Alex Castellanos, advising Republicans on what to say to stop health care reform. A sample:

“Slow down, Mr. President: We can’t afford to get health care wrong,” said the memo.
“Slow down, Mr. President: We can’t afford to get health care wrong,” said the chairman.
Memo: “The old, top-down Washington-centered system the Democrats propose will empower Washington to restrict the cures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you.”
Steele: “The old top-down Washington-centered system the Democrats propose is designed to grow Washington’s power to restrict the cures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you.”
…”We are excited to join the growing number of Americans supporting the patient-centered health-care reform movement,” said the memo, “with patients and doctors in control.”
“Republicans stand with the growing number of Americans supporting the patient-centered health-care reform movement,” said the chairman, “with patients and doctors in control.”

True, parroting stale, boilerplate language is a staple of politics, particularly inside the beltway. Still, one expects the chairman of a political party to change a few words here and there to at least provide an appearance of originality. What makes the context especially amusing as snarkage is Milbank’s set up, quoting Castellanos’s memo:

“We need to bring new language to this debate,” Republican message man Alex Castellanos wrote in a memo to fellow GOP strategists this month. “If we paint the house the same color, no one will notice anything has changed: We will still be the same, outdated Republicans who have no new ideas and oppose everything.”

An inadvertantly prophetic observation. Milbank concludes, “As a voice-throwing act, Castellanos and Steele were quite a duo. But if Castellanos is the ventriloquist, what does that make Steele?”

Reader warning: I’m about to talk about a Rasmussen poll, and not only that, but a Rasmussen poll that shows Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running dead even among likely voters in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, with Obama running just six points ahead of Sarah Palin.
But here’s what’s interesting, even if, and particularly if, the sample for the poll skews Republican: it shows a robust 21% of likely voters supporting a third-party run for Palin if she is denied the GOP nomination.
You might object that lots of those supporters of a Palin third-party bid might be Democrats who love the idea of splitting the GOP vote to help Obama, right?
But a separate question about a three-way race with Romney as the GOP nominee and Palin running indie shows her pulling 16%, and giving Obama an eleven-pont lead.
I’ve always said that the hard-core supporters of St. Joan of the Tundra have a connection with her that won’t go away easily. That could be a problem for the Republican Party under various scenarios.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that not only wholesale Republican opposition, but Democratic divisions, are risking the enactment of health reform legislation this year. Some of those divisions are rooted in relatively narrow objections this or that bill–e.g., jurisdictional squabbles between committees or between House and Senate approaches–or this or that provision–e.g., union opposition to taxation of high-end employer-sponsored health benefits. But the bigger division which falls roughly along ideological lines involves “moderate” Democrats (sometimes, as in last week’s Senate “gang of six,” working with like-minded Republicans) who seem to prefer delaying action on health reform to enactment of anything that vastly increases federal budget deficits, fails to reduce health care inflation, or exposes Democrats to conservative attacks on “big government.”
It’s fair to say that the prevalent attitude among other Democrats towards these “moderates” is one of anger and betrayal, on the theory that only political cowardice or total submission to the health care industry could possibly explain their point of view. And one talking point heard often in denunciations of Democratic foot-draggers on health care is that as “everyone knows,” the failure to enact health reform in Bill Clinton’s first two years caused the Democratic midterm debacle of 1994. Steve Benen, for example, stipulates this assumption about 1994 and quickly goes on to suggest that maybe “centrist” Democrats don’t really give a damn if their party loses seats or even control of Congress in 2010. This attribution of evil motives is also more-or-less incorporated by reference in an otherwise fine post today by TNR’s Jon Cohn on the Democratic politics of health reform.
As someone with still-vivid memories of 1994 and of the raging and inconclusive debate that ensued about the origins of that electoral debacle, I have to say that no, it’s not at all self-evident that the failure of a Democratic-controlled Congress to enact universal health coverage was the primary cause. For one thing, there was a lot going on in November of 1994–a vast number of Democratic retirements, the final stage of the ideological realignment of the South (exacerbated by racial gerrymandering in the House), and residual resentment of a Democratic majority in the House that had been in place since 1954. But even if you believe health care was the single largest factor in the 1994 results, it’s not entirely clear that the failure to enact health reform, as opposed to the unpopularity of the reforms being proposed (not to mention the timing of the health care debate, which in 1994 was on the very brink of the midterm elections), was the predominant factor.
And even if health care was the predominent factor, it’s not at all clear that the defeat of the Clinton health plan, as opposed to the composition and presentation (at least as perceived by the public) of the Clinton health plan, was the vote-killer. Yes, there has always been a point of view in the debate over 1994 that “disappointment” over the Clinton administration’s strikeout on health care, compounded by other White House strategic decisions (most notably the promotion of NAFTA and GATT and the prioritization of deficit reduction at the expense of “investments” in the budget), “discouraged” the Democratic “base” and led to conservative-skewed turnout patterns in 1994, and depressed Democratic performance among those who did turn out. But it’s just a point of view, not incontrovertible fact. A Kaiser Family Foundation election-night survey in 1994 that focused on health care reached a different conclusion:

The survey shows that the voters’ vision of health care reform has shifted toward that held by many moderate Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed said they were less supportive of major health reform than six months ago, with half of those citing as their reason that they did not think the government would do it right. More voters now want Congress to make modest changes in the health care system (41%), rather than enacting a major reform bill (25%). In addition, one in four voters favor leaving the system as it is. [Tables 4 and 5] “These results say that voters want the new Congress to place health care high on their legislative agenda,” said Dr. Robert Blendon, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University. “But what the public means by health reform now comes closest to a more moderate vision: one which is more limited in scope, incremental, and that involves a much more limited role for government.”

My point here is not to argue that this or that theory about 1994 is the gospel truth (though I personally think there are elements of truth in the “discouragement” and the “rejection of big government” theories, along with non-issue explanations). It’s that I wouldn’t buy the idea that go-slow Democrats today know their position on health care will produce an electoral disaster, and just don’t care. For every good, loyal Democrat who has internalized the “discouragement” narrative about 1994, there’s another good, loyal Democrat who “remembers” 1994 as a tale of an “over-reaching” White House and an arrogant congressional Democratic leadership who relied on a secretive process to produce a highly complex health plan that was then marketed as a giant new government entitlement, repelling swing voters.
In the end, motives for the current behavior of Democrats on health care only matter so far. As it happens, I favor the argument that Senate Democrats ought to be pushed (with real consequences) to support a cloture vote on health care–and on climate change–no matter how they feel about the underlying legislation, which would make it a lot easier to get something done.
But the intraparty debate will become an unfortunate dialogue-of-the-deaf if the contending factions base their political assumptions about the consequences of various courses of action on health reform are based on different interpretations of an election held fifteen years ago.

Despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration, including relentless bashing of government investments in scientific research, they were never able to get a full-scale war against science off the ground. The primary reason for their failure appears to be that the public just doesn’t buy into the GOP meme that scientific investments are best left to the private sector, as indicated by recent opinion data. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports in his current ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages,

The Obama administration has put a strong emphasis on scientific research, backed up by funding commitments in the 2010 budget. And this appears to be simpatico with the views of the American public. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows that the public, by 60-29, thinks government investment in research is essential for scientific progress, rather than believing that private investment can ensure scientific progress without government investment.

And breaking down scientific research into two basic components:

And when queried about whether government investments in basic scientific research—and in engineering and technology—pay off in the long run, the public overwhelmingly said yes in both instances: 73-18 for basic scientific research and 74-17 for engineering and technology.

It appears that the GOP war on government-sponsored scientific research is safely dead for the forseable future. As Teixeira concludes, “…The public is not only very supportive of scientific research, but is clearly willing to put its money where its mouth is. This supportive environment should allow scientific research in our country to flourish in the coming years.”

Zackary Roth has an important piece up on the TPM site that notes the profoundly disturbing way many news networks competed for interviews with Mark Sanford by promising to go easy on him and let him spin the “hiking” story the way he wanted. E-mails sent to Sanford’s press people included the following:

• David Gregory: “coming on Meet the Press allows you to frame the conversation as you really want to… You know [Sanford] will get a fair shake from me and coming on Meet the Press puts all of this to rest.”
• Producer for the MSNBC Morning Joe show: “Of course the Governor has an open invite to a friendly place here at Morning Joe, if he would like to speak out.”
• Producer for MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer “…Mark could spin this favorably if he talks it up as the outdoors man in the woods etc. For all we know he’s contemplating the last year of his term and thinking through his priorities before he goes on his family vacation.”
• Anchor for WIS-TV – “Off the record, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. Sounds like slow news day stuff.”

This promise of favorable treatment as an enticement to get a political figure to appear on a particular show is disturbing enough in the case of a governor like Sanford. But its implications are even more – there’s no other word for it – sinister — in the case of two other figures who every TV show is going to be absolutely desperate to snare – Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.
Palin, obviously, will be desperate to limit her exposure to easy “softball” interviews and it’s all too easy to imagine the sleazy promises many shows will make to get her – “Don’t worry, no Cokie Roberts type-stuff”, “we’ll ask you the right kinds of questions ” etc. Romney also will want to avoid all manner of challenges about his changing positions over the years. Obviously, hard-right conservatives like Palin know that they can get a free ride on a FOX show, but so does the audience. It’s much more disturbing to imagine a competition in laxity among all the other networks as well.
Let’s say it plainly: the competition for these two political figures is going to be a vile, no-holds barred race to see which interviewer can flush every speck of his or her journalistic integrity down the toilet — a championship face-off in the World Olympics of media pandering.
But what can Democrats do about this?
Here are three quick ideas:

1. Democrats should insist that TV or other interview shows reveal the terms of any deal they offer Palin or Romney in order for them to appear. If the shows refuse to disclose this, they should be called on it. In fact, under federal communications law, undisclosed “sweetheart” interview deals might even qualify as kickbacks – they are far more valuable to the subjects than cash.
2. The moment any TV show announces an upcoming interview with Palin or Romney, Democratic magazines and websites should immediately begin proposing questions that the interviewer should ask. The Republicans made a big and effective stink claiming that a network show featuring Obama on health care would be slanted before it even aired. Democrats should make no less of an advance stink about likely kid-gloves treatment of Palin or Romney.
3. Desirable Democratic interview subjects should make it clear that they will avoid interviewers who give Palin or Romney kid-gloves treatment and will seek out honest journalists instead.

George Carlin used to have a comedy routine about the TV commercials that promoted new drugs by saying “remember to ask your doctor to prescribe XYZ”. Carlin commented: “When you name the drugs you want your doctor to prescribe, he’s not a doctor any more, he’s a pusher.”
In the same way, when the producer of a network news show promises a political guest control over the questions and formats of their appearance in order to get them to appear on a particular show, he or she is not a news professional any longer, but the journalistic equivalent of a streetwalker.