Media's ACA Coverage Continues To Ignore Positive Stories

[TomCADem]

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed for healthcare coverage. Yet, they are largely invisible as the media continues to focus on negative stories about the ACA or the ACA website even as the website has significantly improved. Here is a nice article documenting the MSM's right wing bias.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/12/09/medias-aca-coverage-continues-to-ignore-positiv/197198

A New York Times article highlighted positive stories of people gaining coverage from the Affordable Care Act's exchanges -- a departure from the media's history of ignoring the law's success stories in favor of overwhelmingly negative coverage.

The media has overwhelmingly turned to negative anecdotal stories in covering the implementation of the ACA's exchanges. In The American Prospect, Paul Waldman argued that the media's tendency to use negative "exemplars" in health care coverage dramatically overemphasizes negative consequences of the law, often employing misleading reporting in order to manufacture "victims" of the law:

* * *
Waldman cited a report from the NBC Nightly News as an example of how the media's coverage of health care consequences can be misleading. The segment highlighted a Los Angeles real estate agent whose premiums were higher after her insurer cancelled her plan and she looked for replacement coverage on the exchange. Waldman pointed out that the segment left out crucial context, such as whether she was eligible for subsidies and what level of coverage her current plan provided. A CBS News segment had similar problems, interviewing a woman named Dianne Barrette who lost her existing coverage and found replacement plans to be much more expensive. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple criticized the report, pointing out that Barrette's current plan was "a pray-that-you-don't-really-get-sick 'plan'" and "could well have bankrupted her."

Fox News' Sean Hannity faced criticism after hosting three couples who professed to be "victims" of the health care law. After Eric Stern, a former senior adviser to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, contacted the three couples after the show aired, he found that none of them had actually been negatively impacted by the law or had even attempted to shop for coverage on the exchanges that they were complaining about.

[doc03]

1. I pick up the newspaper every day and there is at least one negative story

about the ACA. I look on the my Comcast home page and every day there are negative stories. Yahoo news has at least one negative story every day. Our local TV and radio report noting but negative. Then there is Fox 24/7 negative. The only positive stories I have heard are here on DU or on MSNBC in the evening, during the morning they are as bad a Fox. In most cases I don't even think it is bias, that is just the nature of the MSM to report the bad stories. We even had a Congressman write a LTE asking for negative stories on the ACA.

[Bill USA]

2. media matters had a good article on the GOP?M$M Obamacare "Horror" stories ......

The Media's Obamacare "Horror Stories" prove to be mostly BULLSHIT - if anybody would investigate


http://www.democraticunderground.com/101679946