James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal had some fun linking to hard-left Salon.com asking “Our embarrassing, servile media: Does the New York Times just print everything the government tells it?”
Taranto answered by linking to the Times story from Robert Pear published Wednesday on Obamacare. It’s a government press release alright:
“President Obama said Tuesday that 11.4 million people had selected private health insurance plans or renewed their coverage under the Affordable Care Act in the enrollment period that ended Sunday. ‘It gives you some sense of how hungry people were out there for affordable, accessible health insurance,’ Mr. Obama said in a video released by the White House. . . .
‘The Affordable Care Act is working,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘It’s working a little bit better than we anticipated—certainly, I think, working a lot better than many of the critics talked about early on.’ ”
The only people quoted in the story were Obama and his HHS Secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell. The same kind of story appeared again on Thursday, by Robert Pear, on Obamacare. The gist was that every new Obamacare signup makes it more difficult for the Supreme Court to rule against Obamacare. There were no critics of Obamacare quoted by Pear. Apparently no critics are newsworthy.
The Obama administration said Wednesday that 8.6 million people in 37 states had selected or renewed health plans through the federal insurance marketplace, and that most of them would suffer if the Supreme Court blocked premium subsidies for consumers in those states...
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said she did not know how many of the 11.4 million people were previously uninsured. But she said that more than 85 percent of those obtaining insurance in the federal marketplace qualified for premium subsidies in the form of tax credits....
It was, she said, inconceivable that Congress meant to deny premium assistance to them — simply because their states did not set up exchanges — while providing it to residents of New York, California and other states that run their own insurance marketplaces.
What followed were seven references to “Ms. Burwell said,” underlining the Times playing “stenographer to power.” Such as: In a comment that sounded like a message to the Supreme Court, just a few blocks from her office, Ms. Burwell said, “Americans don’t want the progress that we have made to be taken away from them.”
