Summer 1997
Is Privatizing Tampa General Hospital Good for our Community?
By Ben Eason
Editor, The Weekly Planet
The focus of our public journalism efforts has been on framing issues. With our recent coverage of the privatization of our local hospital, we think we have come up with an effective framing process.
The Tampa General Hospital board came up with a plan to take the hospital from a public entity to a private entity. Some of the larger hospital chains have nosed around for a purchase in recent years so this proposal was greeted with much skepticism. Most journalists sensed there was some sort of inside deal at work. The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times immediately set to work examining the inner machinations of the politics around the deal and compiling a list of winners and losers. Nobody was looking at the issue itself — because none of us really understood it.
We ran a cover story and attempted to lay out the issue. We still didn’t cover all of the bases and we knew it. One of the most difficult issues to understand was the very nature of the public hospital. It was public because its start-up capital and some of the expansion capital came from public funds but currently it operated without any tax subsidy.
If there was no current funding then did it really matter who governed it? City and county officials were not demanding any accountability to the public so nobody was covering the public politics around privatization. At the end of our story, we announced we would hold a public meeting with Speak Up Tampa Bay (a dialogue group we helped to form) to discuss the issues that were driving the board to present this plan. There had been a number of public hearings to discuss the plan and these turned out to be shouting matches.
We held a town hall meeting two weeks later. Present were two members of the TGH board, citizens who opposed the plan, several doctors, members of the faculty of the local medical school that uses the hospital, and many citizens who had some connection to the hospital. We explicitly told the participants that we hoped to get a better understanding of the issues, and that at the end of the evening, we would draft a letter to the TGH board describing our findings.
Within two hours, the pro-privatization people were engaged in a genuinely productive dialogue with those opposed. We found there was overall confusion about the issues and a great deal of misunderstanding about the other side’s position. As journalists, we were able to get a very good perspective on how everyone was thinking about the issue and what misperceptions were prevalent. This allowed us to concentrate on the most vital pieces of the issue. In the end, the group came to a consensus on five issues but could not find common ground on how to address them. These issues all revolved around two concerns: 1) The community’s responsibility to provide for its needy citizens and guarantees that if TGH goes private would this continue? 2) the financial case for privatization — what were the other options?
What we found in this framing exercise was that we could get all sides in a room and they could actually come to an agreement about the core issues at stake. If your coverage hits the core issues, then it can help the community to focus on the problem — not the politics of the problem.
As journalists, we are great at the politics but when we cover the issues, we seldom get all points of view in the story. In a forum, we could begin to understand that there can be many sides to the issue — beyond pro and con. For example, members of the African American community at the forum raised several long-standing grievances about past unkept promises the power structure had made; they felt the hospital issue was a repeat performance.
Following the meeting, we mailed the letter and published it. Within two weeks, the president of TGH sent a reply, which we also published. We had asked the TGH board to help the public understand the issues. In the end, the board went ahead with privatization. Several good suggestions about alternatives that arose at the forum were quickly dismissed. The letter from TGH only scratched the surface of the concerns raised.
It was a shame the issue moved so quickly because we felt the public could have found a new way to become connected with a public issue and the ultimate plan would have been a lot stronger.
We had such a positive experience with this approach that we are going to incorporate the process of large town hall meetings whenever large civic issues face our community. We, as journalists, feel it is ultimately better to frame the issue first and then have the coverage follow from the frame. Most of the time, journalists get this backwards — we jump in the fray and sort things out later.
We’re hopeful that we can rebuild a public trust in our community by such exercises to help us include citizens’ concerns in our coverage. At a minimum, we won’t continue to drive them out of the process.