While trying to win elections, the Democratic strategy is often perceived as combining several minorities -- including African-Americans, feminists, global warming alarmists and members of labor unions -- to pull together a winning total over Republicans, who usually try to draw more than 50 percent of the general population, a strategy that has often been hammered by liberals and members of the “mainstream” media as painting the GOP as “the party of the rich.”
However, ever since the October 1 rollout of ObamaCare, the program and its website have come under intense scrutiny for not working well, a charge that is now being brandished by Hispanics, who have usually voted Democratic but are accusing CuidadoDeSalud.gov of using computers to translate the original text from English into “Spanglish,” an “insulting” combination of the two languages.
Wall Street Journal
The Obama administration today revealed that more than half of the sign-ups for ObamaCare are aged 45 and older, hardly the sort of young, healthy insurance pool the White House was hoping for.
On their websites, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times all focused on the older/sicker skew of the Healthcare.gov signups. The Washington Post, however, tried to accentuate the positive for the administration. "Young adults make up almost one-quarter of health sign-ups," cheered the WashingtonPost.com headline [see collage of headlines below the page break]. But as Louise Radnofsky reported for the Journal (emphasis mine):
Print, broadcast or web, the media sure aren’t Nostradamus. In spite of their best attempts, the news media have gotten it wrong prediction after prediction on a wide range of business and economic issues in 2013.
Just in the past year, reporters warned of “economic doomsday,” thought Healthcare.gov was going to be “easy” just like Amazon.com, and warned of melting polar ice, even as a new record was set for ice mass.
Earlier this morning, Joe Newby at NewsBusters posted on the Denver Post's scrubbing of the word "socialist" from a fellow student's description of Karl Pierson, who police say shot two other students and then took his own life at Arapahoe High School on Friday. The Post story originally said that classmate Thomas Conrad described him as "a very opinionated Socialist." Sometime later, the Post watered the description down to "very opinionated" without telling readers what it had done.
Wait until you see the lame, condescending attempt at a defense offered by Post Senior Editor for News Lee Ann Colacioppo in a tweeted response to a reader's challenge on Saturday afternoon:
James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal took on the strange conflict that is PolitiFact picked a “Lie of the Year” they’ve repeatedly defended as “Half True.” Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it once he passed his badly named "Affordable Care Act." He called it "PolitiFact's Forked Tongue."
PolitiFact has only drawn a yellow Hi-Liter through what’s wrong with liberal media-elite “fact checking” patrols: It exploits their "objective" image as it declares a campaign promise as factual (or not) prematurely, before there’s any factual reality to judge. From the beginning of the “truth squad” tendency in the 1992 presidential campaign, we’ve found this disturbing tendency.
Seung Min Kim and Jennifer Haberkorn at the Politico have apparently been living in hermetically sealed Beltway caves since early October.
In an item which appeared Tuesday evening, the pair acted as if the idea that Americans stand a great chance of losing access to their current doctors and other medical providers as a result of signing up for a health care plan through the Obamacare exchange is something brand new. Kim and Haberkorn write that Republican opponents of Obamacare are going to have to "replicate the uproar" which occurred with "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan," when the uproar has been building for weeks, based on numerous stories involving real people (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
As has so often been the case since Barack Obama took office in 2009, the editorialists at a major national business newspaper are reporting facts that the wire services and broadcast networks should have relayed to the American people weeks or months ago.
In this case, it's the Wall Street Journal. A Friday evening editorial published in Saturday's print edition directly refutes the Obama administration's key Obamacare memes involving affordability, choice, and the nature of the once-free health insurance market (bolds are mine):
Here’s one fairly obvious sign The Wall Street Journal isn’t run as a partisan Obama-bashing rag after being acquired by Rupert Murdoch. On the front of Wednesday’s paper is an article headlined “The Fall of King Coal Hits Hardest in the Mines of Kentucky.” Reporters Kris Maher and Tom McGinty used federal data to note the number of mining jobs has collapsed in eastern Kentucky.
But there’s no mention of who the miners blame for their plight until paragraph 29. That’s a “war on coal” waged by Barack Obama:
In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw is feeling Barack Obama's pain in an article titled "Imagine the Tweets During the Cuban Missile Crisis." The pull quote was "The JFK who charmed the press would have had a harder time in today's media world."
Translation: JFK wouldn't have had as many eager myth-makers as he did. Brokaw despaired about how he was working on a JFK special while observing the shutdown -- "food fight, meltdown" -- between Republicans and Obama. He couldn't help but recall the good old days before New Media challenged liberal orthodoxy:
The news media worried a lot about how awful the government shutdown would be and estimated it would take a huge toll on the economy as well. Now it looks like they were wrong about the size of the damage.
The networks touted a recent Standard & Poor’s (S&P) estimate that the shutdown would cost $24 billion. That figure was mentioned on the networks five times from Oct. 17 to Oct. 24. But according to new figures from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the economic toll was one-fourth that size or less: between $2 billion and $6 billion. The OMB estimate was only mentioned in one Nov. 8 story on CBS, according to a Nexis search from Nov. 7 through Nov. 10.
The press has been obsessed with the fate of Obamacare's contraception mandate ever since religious, corporate, and other litigants began challenging it in the courts.
So what explains the fact that a search on "Korte" at the Associated Press's national site and at the New York Times return nothing and nothing relevant, respectively? Or that there are only nine stories at Google Newsin a search on “Korte contraception court” (not in quotes), only two of them from establishment press outlets, on the Friday Appeals Court ruling in Chicago in Korte vs. Sebelius? That's easy. It didn't go the "right" way, and the ruling appears to have been significant. Excerpts from Joe Palazzolo's coverage at the Wall Street Journal, one of those two establishment press outlets, follow the jump (bolds are mine):
On Saturday morning, three Wall Street Journal reporters told readers that as President Obama was promoting Obamacare, there was internal debate between "policy advisers" and "political aides" as to whether the President's obviously unqualified and unconditional "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" statement, made roughly 20 times between his inauguration and the law's March 2010 passage, "was a promise they could keep."
"Policy advisers" didn't like it, but "political aides" prevailed, concluding that Obama's promise should remain dishonestly unconditional because "salability" and "simplification" were more "practical" and important than the truth. One particularly weak paragraph in the Journal report ends up reading like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" riff (bolds are mine throughout this post):