July 12, 2016
The media often feel the need to be balanced in its coverage of Republicans and Democrats even when the evidence doesn’t lend itself to much balance. We got a strange example of such an effort at balance in a NYT article reporting on a piece on the Affordable Care Act by President Obama that ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the NYT piece, Obama said that he would like to see larger subsidies for the health insurance policies in the exchanges, that he would like people to be able to buy into a public plan like Medicare, and he would like to rein in the drug companies.
After laying out the changes that President Obama would like to see in the Affordable Care Act the piece tells readers:
“Mr. Obama accused Republicans of ‘hyperpartisanship’ without saying what he might have done differently.”
This assertion makes no sense since the whole article is describing an agenda that President Obama would like to see, if not for the obstruction of Republicans. In other words, Obama was very specific about what he might have done differently, at least according to the article.
Comments