“Anecdotal Journalism At Its Worse”: Every News Story Has Two Sides, Except, Apparently Obamacare
The rocky rollout of Obamacare has prompted commentators to attack the president and his team for having three years to plan for the launch and still not getting it right. That’s a legitimate critique as problems persist. But the same can be said for an awful lot of reporters doing a very poor job covering Obamacare. They also had three years to prepare themselves to accurately report the story.
So what’s their excuse?
The truth is, the Beltway press rarely bothers to explain, let alone cover, public policy any more. With a media model that almost uniformly revolves around the political process of Washington (who’s winning, who’s losing?), journalists have distanced themselves from the grungy facts of governance, especially in terms of how government programs work and how they effect the citizenry.
But explaining is the job of journalism. It’s one of the crucial roles that newsrooms play in a democracy. And in the recent case of Obamacare, the press has failed badly in its role. Worse, it has actively misinformed about the new health law and routinely highlighted consumers unhappy with Obamacare, while ignoring those who praise it.
As Joshua Holland noted at Bill Moyers’ website, “lazy stories of “sticker shock” and cancellations by reporters uninterested in the details of public policy only offer the sensational half of a complicated story, and that’s providing a big assist to opponents of the law.”
It’s part of a troubling trend. Fresh off of blaming both sides for the GOP’s wholly-owned, and thoroughly engineered, government shutdown, the press is now botching its Obamacare reporting by omitting key facts and context — to the delight of Republicans. It’s almost like there’s a larger newsroom pattern in play.
And this week the pattern revolved around trying to scare the hell out of people with deceiving claims about how Obamacare had forced insurance companies to “drop” clients and how millions of Americans had “lost” their coverage.
Not quite.
Insurance companies informed some customers that plans that didn’t meet minimum standards required by Obamacare would be phased out. But the part often obscured or downplayed in breathless “cancellation” news reports is that consumers are able to shop for new plans that in many cases are superior to the old ones, and often less expensive (or partially paid for by subsidies). In other words, they’re transitioning from one plan to another.
It’s understandable why right-wing partisan voices only interested in trashing Obamacare and damaging the president would push claims, as Breitbart.com recently did, that nearly one million Californians have “lost” their insurance because of the new law. (They didn’t.) It’s less clear why mainstream reporters would traffic in that same kind of misleading claims.
Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher has been methodically dissecting erroneous and painfully misleading Obamacare reports this week. He concluded one big problem is “a reliance on consumers who aren’t insurance experts, and reporters who aren’t much better.”
Reporters, and especially television reporters, seem anxious to interview consumers who have been notified by letter that their insurance policy has been canceled and who say they’re shocked to find out how expensive purchasing a new plan will be.
But as Christopher discovered, that’s often not the case and that consumers and reporters either don’t understand the options that are available, or haven’t researched the issue enough. (Christopher was able to find much less expensive plans for several consumers touted in TV reports.) That’s because (surprise!) the cost of new insurance plans quoted in letters sent by insurance companies often don’t represent the lowest option available via the open exchange.
Just look at the now-infamous CBS report about Florida resident Dianne Barrette who complained her premium under Obamacare would increased tenfold, from $54 a month to $591 a month. (She was quickly invited onto Fox News to tell her tale.) But a woman paying just $54 a month for health insurance didn’t set off any red flags among editors at CBS News? Barrette’s health plan — the best she could afford — was a barely-there “junk health insurance” policy that didn’t cover hospitalization, ambulance service, or prescription drugs.
Left unsaid by CBS, as Holland reported, was the fact that under Obamacare Barrette qualified “for a bronze plan, which guarantees free preventive care and coverage for hospitalizations, for only $97 per month — one-sixth of that headline number that’s making the rounds.”
Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News profiled another so-called Obamacare “sticker shock” victim and detailed how Deborah Cavallaro’s monthly premium would go up from $293 to $484. (She appeared on CNBC to repeat her Obamacare complaints.) But then American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman did some online shopping and found a plan that Cavallaro qualified for and cost $258 per-month, $35 less than the plan that’s being canceled.
“If you find someone who’s going to end up paying more thanks to Obamacare, fair enough,” wrote Waldman. “Run with the story. But first, you’d better perform the due diligence to find out what a comparable plan really costs.” (Still, lots of reporters don’t.)
Christopher noted another glaring omission from the ongoing reporting: “None of these reports take the extra step of explaining the tremendous benefits of the Affordable Care Act, for which most reasonable people wouldn’t necessarily mind a bit of a tradeoff.”
Also, absent from virtually all the reports is the acknowledgement that insurance companies canceling existing plans in the individual market and consumers being forced to join new ones is not an unusual occurrence. At all.
Obamacare coverage has often been anecdotal journalism at its worst, simply because it’s been the same one anecdote told over and over and over.
One CBS report acknowledged, “Industry experts say about half the people getting the letters will pay more — and half will pay less, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.” If that’s the case, where are the television news reports featuring the “half” who will soon be paying less for health insurance thanks to Obamacare?
Maybe I’ve just missed them all? But for this news viewer the pattern seems unmistakable: Consumers who might have to pay more (or more accurately, consumers who think they might have to pay more) are welcomed before the cameras to tell their understandably frustrating tales.
In his bad-news Obamacare report featuring three frustrated health care consumers, CNN’s Drew Griffin admitted that he didn’t even bother looking for success stories. Instead, as host Anderson Cooper explained, because Obama had given a speech extolling the benefits of Obamacare, it was CNN’s and Griffin’s job to “counter against that.”
And then there was the absurd CBS report which highlighted one man’s complaint that under Obamacare all insurance plans must provide maternity care coverage. As Media Matters noted, instead of interviewing a beneficiary of the maternity coverage, CBS highlighted a man upset that his plan included the key benefit.
The media rule has been hard to miss: Consumers who have complaints about Obamacare are much, much more newsworthy than those who have praise.
By the way, in case anyone is interested, here are some examples of Obamacare fans (who have been highlighted by local media outlets and personal online postings):
* Phil Sherburne in Salt Lake City purchased health insurance for his family of five for just $123 per-month.
* California mechanic and small business owner Rakesh Rikhi purchased $500-a-month health insurance, helping him save $5,000 each year.
* Katie Klabusich sometimes paid more for health insurance each month than she did for rent, and bounced around from bad plan to bad plan. Now thanks to Obamacare she has solid health insurance. Or, “HOLY SHIT I HAVE COMPREHENSIVE MEDICAL COVERAGE STARTING IN TEN WEEKS!”, as Klabusich wrote on her blog.
Every news story has two sides. Except, apparently, Obamacare.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 30, 2013
“Purposeful Lying”: Time To Investigate Those Health Insurance Company Letters
As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say “We’re cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here’s another policy you can get for much more money.” Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.
There’s something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It’s time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they’re telling their customers. Because they could have told them, “As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever.” But instead, they’re just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It’s as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, “That 2010 Toyota Corolla you’re leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price.” They’re not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you’re paying now.
I’m not sure that’s what’s happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it’s definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton’s health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton’s plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn’t matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn’t mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone’s plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn’t mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.
The more complex reality is that because the law imposed new requirements on insurers for what they have to cover and what they can charge, the insurers were inevitably going to make changes to their existing plans in response. And yes, that means many people’s insurance is going to change. In most cases it will change for the better, and the effect all this is going to have on premiums is yet to be seen. But it sure looks like insurance companies are trying to make sure anyone who’s displeased aims their ire at the government, and if they can get people to buy a more expensive product along the way, they’ll be happy to do that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 29, 2013
“The Press And The ‘Leadership’ Charade”: Pundits Are Professionally Wed To Faulting President Obama For Republicans Shortcomings
Just days after the government shutdown came to an end, and with public opinion polls continuing to show that the Republican Party paid a grave price for its radical and shortsighted maneuver, Meet The Press host David Gregory wanted to discuss President Obama’s failure to lead.
Pointing to a mocking National Journal piece by Ron Fournier, that was headlined “Obama Wins! Big Whoop. Can He Lead?” Gregory pressed his guests about when Obama would finally “demonstrate he can bring along converts to his side and actually get something meaningful accomplished.” Gregory was convinced the president had to shoulder “a big part of the responsibility” for the shutdown crisis, due to the president’s failed leadership. New York Times columnist David Brooks agreed Obama is at fault, stressing “The question he’s never answered in all these years is, ‘How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?'”
Gregory, Brooks and Fournier were hardly alone in suggesting that Obama’s a failed leader. Why a failure? Because a Democratic president beset by Republicans who just implemented a crazy shutdown strategy hasn’t been able to win them to his side.
In her post-shutdown New York Times column, Maureen Down ridiculed Obama, claiming he “always manages to convey tedium at the idea that he actually has to persuade people to come along with him, given the fact that he feels he’s doing what’s right” (i.e., Obama’s too arrogant to lead.)
And in a lengthy Boston Globe piece last week addressing Obama’s failure to achieve unity inside the Beltway, Matt Viser wrote that Obama “bears considerable responsibility” for the Beltway’s fractured, dysfunctional status today (it’s “his biggest failure”) because “his leadership style” has “angered countless conservatives, who have coalesced into a fiercely uncompromising opposition.” That’s right, it’s Obama’s fault his critics hate him so much.
Talk about blaming the political victim.
As an example of Obama’s allegedly vexing “leadership style,” Viser pointed to the fact Democrats passed a health care reform bill without the support of a single Republican. That “helped spur the creation of the Tea Party and a “de-fund Obamacare” movement,” according to the Globe. But that’s false. The ferocious anti-Obama Tea Party movement exploded into plain view on Fox News 12 months before the party-line health care vote took place in early 2010. Obama’s “leadership style” had nothing to do with the fevered right-wing eruption that greeted his inauguration.
The GOP just suffered a humiliating shutdown loss that has its own members pointing fingers of blame at each other. So of course pundits have turned their attention to Obama and pretended the shutdown was a loss for him, too. Why? Because the Beltway media rules stipulate if both sides were to blame for the shutdown that means both sides suffered losses. So pundits pretend the crisis highlighted Obama’s glaring lack of leadership.
But did it? Does that premise even make sense? Isn’t there a strong argument to be made that, by staring down the radicals inside the Republican Party who closed the government down in search of political ransom, Obama unequivocally led? And that he led on behalf of the majority of Americans who disapproved of the shutdown, who deeply disapprove of the Republican Party, and who likely did not want Obama to give in to the party’s outlandish demands?
Doesn’t leadership count as standing up for what you believe in and not getting run over, not getting trucked by hard-charging foes?
Yet so many pundits are professionally wed to faulting Democrats for Republicans shortcomings that the agreed-up script is that the GOP’s stunning implosion meant Obama failed to lead by not bringing the two parties together. He wasn’t persuasive enough. And if he had just tried a little harder, asked a little nicer, Republicans would’ve totally come around.
Much of the current leadership commentary is built on the tired trope that Obama “promised” to change the tone and culture of Washington; to break down partisan barriers. And since he hasn’t, that’s botched leadership. Of course what Obama did do, like virtually every presidential candidate before him has done, is vow to try to change the culture in Washington, and to try to get both parties together.
The fact that Republicans plotted as far back as January 2009 to make it their primary goal to thwart Obama’s attempt at bipartisanship, is now used as a weapon against the president under the lazy premise he “promised” to change Republican behavior. By failing to lead, by failing to change Republicans’ deeply extremist behavior, Obama must shoulder the blame, goes the faulty Beltway logic.
“Despite polarization, Obama’s two predecessors managed to find common ground with their obstinate opposing parties,” Fournier recently wrote, in a sentence that almost perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with the trolling about “leadership.” It’s predicated on a completely outdated premise, which suggests that since previous presidents were able to work, at times, with the opposing party that means Obama should too. And if he can’t, that means he’s not leading. That claim entirely omits all the context about today’s radicalized Republican Party. It entirely omits everything that’s happened in American politics since 2009.
For instance, did Obama’s predecessors face opponents who launched an unprecedented campaign to scuttle a Secretary of Defense nomination? Did they face political foes who shut down the federal government in a comically doomed attempt to defund a three-year-old law, who didn’t blink at denying Americans disaster relief aid, or who obstructed legislation that garnered 90 percent support among voters?
They did not.
When Obama’s immediate predecessor was sworn into office, President Bush was soon greeted by liberal Democrat George Miller (D-CA) who promised to help him secure the votes he needed to pass an education bill. And it was liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who personally guided Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation through Congress.
Memo to media: Thanks to extremist Republicans, that Washington, D.C. world no longer exists, so stop pretending that it does. And stop penalizing Obama for arriving too late to experience it.
Why doesn’t it exist? Because Republican re-wrote the rules and pundits keep scoring Obama against the old one. They keep scolding him for not winning over purposefully un-persuadable Republicans.
“We’re saying there’s a reason Republicans almost certainly can’t be won over,” noted Washington Post writer Greg Sargent, who regularly pushes back against the media’s “leadership” charade. “And that this reason resides not in the failure of presidential persuasion but in basic realities about today’s GOP.”
Just ask Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). After he defied his party and tried to help get a bipartisan background gun check bill through Congress last winter, he explained its defeat: “In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”
And with that, Toomey, a Republican senator, gave away the game. He pulled back the curtain and confirmed how the Republican Party actually functions under Obama: It fights him on every conceivable front, withholding the slightest bit of support not necessarily because of ideology, but because most members do not want to see Obama succeed.
Ever.
That represents a stunning lack of leadership. And it’s not coming from the Oval Office.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, October 22, 2013
“The Original Naysayer”: Obstructionist Mitch McConnell Totally Said No Before Saying No Was Cool
A number of journalists have been casting about desperately for sources of hope, and some of them have settled on moderate Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Paul Kane calls him “perhaps the most accomplished congressional dealmaker of his time.” McConnell hasn’t been shy about portraying himself as a savior, either. “I’ve demonstrated, once again, that when the Congress is in gridlock and the country is at risk, I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch,” he told Robert Costa.
McConnell has no right to say that about himself. He has engaged in as much obstructionism as the worst of them, and his ideas are partly responsible for bringing Republicans to their current state of disarray.
The senator from Kentucky was the original naysayer. Soon after President Obama’s election, McConnell instructed Republicans to oppose Obama at every opportunity. The goal appears to have been to make sure that the country was chaotically governed for four years so that the president would not win a second term. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell said. “If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Sen. George Voinovich (R-Oh.) told Mike Grunwald. McConnell “wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
This is the kind of dealmaker McConnell is. He will make a deal or put a halt to legislative action altogether, depending where he believes the political advantage lies.
It also seems that McConnell’s strategy of opposition has seriously damaged his party’s ability to develop and propose their own original ideas. Conservatives do have plenty of good ideas, but when constructive legislating is off the table for electoral reasons, it’s easy to speculate that legislators and their staffs will devote less time and fewer resources to thinking about those ideas — how to implement them and how to include them as part of a complete legislative agenda. It does seem clear that the Republicans in the House are simply taking their cue from McConnell, even though he chides them for their ineffectiveness in his interview with Costa. It was McConnell who first declared uniform opposition to be the mark of loyal conservatism.
When a party has no ideas of its own, negotiations become impossible. The cause of the most recent crisis was that Republicans had no positive demands to offer — no new policies they wanted to see enacted. They could only offer negative ones — existing policies they wanted postponed or terminated, specifically, the health care law — which, of course, Democrats did not accept. Had there been a positive, thoughtful G.O.P. agenda, Democrats could have conceded one or more of its elements, allowing Republicans to save face without engaging in brinksmanship and perhaps even implementing a worthwhile program or two.
McConnell insisted on putting politics before policy, which is exactly the kind of thinking that has crippled his party. He can be credited for rescuing Republicans, but only from his own mistakes.
By: Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2013
“A Ransom By Any Other Name”: The Larger Concern Is That Republican Tactics Are Too Dangerous And Destructive
Words have power and meaning, especially in politics, which is why the parties and their pollsters invest so much energy in choosing the most effective phrases possible. Fox News didn’t push “slimdown” as an ideologically pleasing alternative to “shutdown” for entertainment’s sake — it’s about winning an argument by defining the parameters of the debate.
Professional news organizations are often careful on this front because they don’t want to advance one set of talking points over another, and this in turn sometimes leads to interesting media pushback.
Last week, for example, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney used a variety of metaphors during a press briefing to describe congressional Republicans extortion strategies, but as Scott Wilson noted, one in particular was not well received.
[I]t was “ransom” — a word Obama has used repeatedly to describe Republican negotiating tactics — that struck the last press corps nerve. The usual briefing room decorum, such as it is, broke down entirely when Carney said finally that Obama would sign a debt-ceiling extension but not if it meant “paying a ransom” to Republicans.
“The president will not pay ransom for … ” Carney began.
“You see it as a ransom, but it’s a metaphor that doesn’t serve our purposes … ” NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro shouted back with broad support from other confused reporters.
There’s an official transcript online if you want to see the complete context, but it appears that “ransom” was a bridge too far for some of the journalists covering the White House.
I’m not unsympathetic to reporters’ concerns — “ransom” is not exactly a neutral term. Republicans have acknowledged publicly that they’ve held the debt ceiling “hostage,” but they have not gone so far as to accept “ransom” as a broadly agreed upon term.
But under the circumstances, I’m also not sure which word would satisfy the political establishment as less shrill.
Congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown unless their demands were met, then they threatened a debt-ceiling crisis, too. GOP officials not only embraced the word “hostage” and threatened to do deliberate harm to the country unless they were satisfied by Democratic offers, but they also said they expected Democrats to make concessions in exchange for nothing — except the release of their metaphorical hostages.
If “ransom” is excessive, what’s the alternative that’s both temperate and accurate? Payoff? Is that better or worse?
It’s challenging to apply terms to circumstances like these, in large part because the conditions are so unusual. We’re just not accustomed to seeing major political parties threaten the nation with deliberate harm in order to get their way, and these radical tactics force us to use descriptions that would probably be overly harsh during more traditional political times.
Sometimes, though, a word may be provocative, and may even carry a politically charged meaning, but it may also be right. In the case of the latest Republican hostage crisis, I’d argue the larger concern isn’t whether “ransom” is too mean but whether the tactics are too dangerous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 14, 2013
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