Just when I thought the media's absolutely overblown and breathless "coverage" of the problems with the federal healthcare exchange website had reached its terminal level (in that the media had reached a total saturation/ridiculousness level), I stopped by the ol' New York Times website to be greeted by the following:
The troubled health care rollout has led to comparisons of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
This little gem was underneath the link to a "News Analysis" column near the very top of the Times' site; within the article, there are no officials, pundits or Joe Shmoe's quoted who make such a comparison. Rather, it looks like this absurd and shameful analogy flows from Micheal Shearer, the author of the piece. You can view it for yourself
here.
There for a while, I really felt that the media's overkill on the website's problems had reached its peak, but now we have "even the New York Times" comparing healthcare.gov's issues with a badly bungled response to a huge natural disaster in which hundreds of Americans died. Seeing this low point in our media begs the question of how soon we will be seeing "analysis" stating that the rollout of the Affordable Care Act has been worse than the war in Iraq?
Unfortunately, the Times' patently offensive comparison is the logical terminus for the unprecedented false equivalences we have been seeing since the end of the government shutdown.
Since the end of the government shutdown, the American mainstream news outlets have been on a crusade against the Affordable Care Act and in particular healthcare.gov. I firmly believe that after seeing the damage that Republicans had done to their party over the course of the two week shutdown, our esteemed "liberal" media was determined to create a problem for Democrats and the president equal to, or greater than, the GOP shutdown. This problem was ready and waiting for our mainstream news outlets in the form of the issues with the federal health exchange.
Since the shutdown, NPR's lead stories on its Morning Edition and All Things Considered programs have been dominated by healthcare.gov. Quite honestly, I haven't seen anything like it from NPR, who have never been afraid to engage in gross false equivalence when covering politics (full disclosure: I LOATHE NPR, though illogically I still listen daily). Local media have been just as bad: family members in Wichita have told me that the local newspaper "The Eagle" has had a front-page story on the site's failings for three solid weeks. Our wonderful media's laser-like scrutiny of healthcare.gov stands in stark contrast to their disastrous performance from 2000-2009, during which, coincidentally, a Republican was in the White House. Strange, that.
Listen, I fully acknowledge there have been problems with the site, that it should have been far more operational (even functional) at its launch, and that there is deserved political trouble here. Further, nobody on this site could ever accuse me of being a cheerleader for the president (if you don't believe me, look through some of my old comments and diaries). That being said, I am getting angrier and angrier by the day. The website is improving by the day, yet the media has completely ensured that the accepted and conventional wisdom is that the website is a complete disaster, the Affordable Care Act is a disaster, and that it was a mistake by Obama to try to do anything about healthcare, period.
What is SO. FUCKING. INFURIATING. is that the media (and the right-wing losers, and the pathetic Democratic politicians threatening to jump ship) are ignoring two absolutely critical stories in their direct frontal assault on the law:
(1) Nobody--nobody--has been denied health coverage or insurance because of the site's problems--nobody. The damn plans don't even take effect until January 1, 2014, yet the media have already deemed the law a failure before it has been fully implemented. In short, there is plenty of time to fix the site, get people enrolled and covered, and make the website rollout a "no harm, no foul" situation. Instead, the media are determined to do the right-wing's work for them and destroy this law before it gets off the ground.
(2) The healthcare crisis that has existed in this coverage for decades. Rescissions, denied coverage, junk insurance policies, skyrocketing premiums, medical cost-related bankruptcies--NONE of these have been given any time in the media's tear-down of the ACA. I guess we are supposed to pretend that everything in our healthcare system was perfect before, and a botched website rollout for ONE FUCKING MONTH is supposed to be more harmful to the American people than the aforementioned evils of the healthcare status quo. Further, the benefits of the ACA have been completely and totally ignored in the overwhelming reporting on the website.
Seeing the media's hatchet job on the website has been breathtaking. I don't think I've ever seen such a pack mentality at work, and we are now seeing the fruits of the media's labor, with Obama's popularity dropping and cowardly Democratic politicians doing what they do best--caving and concern-trolling--all because of one month's problems with a website that will be fixed, will enroll people, and will ultimately be successful. I only hope the media's collective rampage because of the website doesn't destroy the law before it has a chance to really help people.