"Mission Accomplished"

The dreaded deadline for the Affordable Care Act's healthcare.gov fixes has finally arrived. As of midnight tonight, according to the popular media, every single problem with healthcare.gov should be fixed or the Obama administration will amount to an utter failure.

This sort of dooms-day-scenarios are a favorite of the national media outlets. As I've spoken before about interpreting election results, this sort of deadline tea-leaves is more or less exactly the same. More than anything, prominent "unbiased" pundits will ensure that these narratives persist, and that the administration is wholly unable to move beyond the type of slip-ups and mistakes that plague everyday existence.

Media outlets took the idea that the President wanted a lot of these glitches to be fixed by the end of November to mean that, "The site needs to be flawless by midnight on the last day of November." It's quite incredible to consider the overarching obsession with conflict and chaos that the media has.

More than anything, this gives popular media outlets an absolutely terrible name. Any time I've turned any news outlet on in the past two weeks, this is literally the only story they've been reporting on. Anecdote after anecdote, while throwing in a poll or two about how Republican party has shrugged off the defeat of the government shutdown in October. The idea that the media frames the national political discourse is an extremely generous way of describing its destructive, short-sighted effect on American politics.

http://news.yahoo.com/stakes-high-obamacare-website-hits-deadline-111611255.html;_ylt=A2KJ2PZKsppSzm0AVivQtDMD

The Nuclear Option

When I heard that a "nuclear option" was being considered in the US Senate, I began to panic for a brief moment before realizing that it was just another case of over-hyped media obsession with drama. As I read on, the decidedly undramatic nature of the story began to reveal itself. The media's portrayal of this "conflict" has not reflected the necessity, nor the facts, surrounding the issue.

Of the 168 filibusters over an executive appointment since the beginning of the Constitutional United States well over 200 years ago, over half of them have occurred during the Obama Presidency. That is a difficult figure to wrap your head around, especially since the President is only a year into his second term. However, the obvious abuse of this previously noble institutional tool is apparent to anyone willing to look at the facts and circumstances of this debate.

There's a funny Jon Stewart clip that summarizes the media phenomenon regarding this story quite well:

Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Overall, despite the historic nature of this "rules change," it was a necessary and important alteration in order to make this otherwise failing institution function properly.


http://news.yahoo.com/why-harry-reid-finally-went-nuclear-senates-filibuster-125200983.html;_ylt=A2KJ2UglsppSgm0AXBvQtDMD

The ACA Post #346,221,376

This is something that I've wound up talking a lot about in this blog: false equivalencies for the sake of fostering dichotomous political battles. Popular American media outlets are particularly guilty of this information crime, and nowhere is it more present than in the coverage of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and its website, healthcare.gov.

The story of the failed launch has been fodder enough for popular media sources, but their attention has shifted a bit since then. There's been a growing narrative about the dreaded deadline the Obama administration has built for itself regarding the ultimate fix of the healthcare website, which I will inevitably talk about in a later post. However, I'm also speaking of the growing concern regarding the millions of healthcare plans that are being dropped by private insurance companies in order to comply with the ACA.

The media obviously jumped all over this story, building it up as the president lying, a failure of the ACA, etc. I think we've all seen enough clips of President Obama saying, "If you like your plan, you can keep it," ad infinitum. However, an important feature of this story that the media is entirely ignoring in favor of the conflict and drama of the alternative forgery of reality is that the ACA is not dropping these plans. The Obama administration is not dropping your plan. Private insurance companies saw their best course of action to meet the requirements of insurance plan quality was to drop the ones that were junk. Those are the plans being dropped. Democrats and liberal surrogates have been endlessly spouting off this talking point to little effect: the media continues it unfettered narrative. Is the federal government now supposed to say, "Private companies no longer even have control over which plans they will choose to carry or ultimately dump"? That hardly seems like the message the conservative media is advocating.

It is a fine line we're treading here, and Obama tried to tread it by clarifying his previous campaign statements. He was highly criticized even by Democrats for this, but it really is a subtle, grey-area we're working within here as a country. This legislation represents a complicated interaction between a highly unregulated private market and the federal/state government(s) attempting to reign in bad business practices and insufficient coverage. While the world isn't black/white at the end of the day, that doesn't stop the media from demanding it to be.

This again begs a further analysis: false equivalencies. We've seen the media build up a "Pro" and "Con" table concerning the ACA, and the potentially newly-insured millions, especially those with diseases that were previously unable to be covered in the first place, are being honestly and equally compared to the inconvenience of having your insurance plan dropped. The media also conveniently ignores the fact that insurance companies dropped people on a constant basis before the ACA for pre-existing conditions and insufficient coverage. Where was the incessant media outrage then? Instead, the media is establishing these false equivalencies as though they can honestly compare to each other. Just another example of ridiculously out-of-touch, beyond-the-pale priorities.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-white-house-dropped-healthcare-plans-20131113,0,4118943.story?track=rss#axzz2mBowNP9A

Rubio, Paul, and Christie

In this brief video clip and accompanying article, Marco Rubio reflects on the meaning of the historic Christie victory in the New Jersey governor race. In a reaction very similar to that of Senator Rand Paul, Rubio makes it a point to say that you can't extrapolate national electoral meanings from such a local election.

Understandably, this sort of dismissal of Christie's win is being interpreted as a shallow display of a violated ego. However, I interpret the statement of both Rubio and Paul as a sort of indictment of the media's obsession with over-analyzing and over-interpreting electoral results. This sort of over-interpretation can be easily seen in the 2012, 2010, and 2008 election cycles. At the end of all 3 (and presumably far before these three, as well), the media predicted the utter collapse and imminent electoral failure of the overarching losers of the races. For instance, in 2010 after the Republicans took control of the House and Obama's "shellacking" comment, prominent media outlets were quick to herald an upcoming trend of Republican dominance. Similarly, after 2008, every story for a year afterward was about how the Republican party was essentially destroyed by the defeat and would likely be shuffled to the sidelines for what appeared to be a generation.

So, in typical fashion, the media outlets who report exclusively on the horse race of politics were quick to not only interpret the Christie victory as something more meaningful than it actually is, but were also just as likely to dismiss criticisms of media reaction to the Christie victory.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/06/rubio-dont-jump-to-conclusions-about-meaning-of-christie-win/