CNN's Jim Acosta bragged that his network does not call the Affordable Care Act "ObamaCare," a term he said Republicans prefer. However, CNN has repeatedly referred to the law as "ObamaCare" in its reporting.
"He [Romney] used the term 'ObamaCare,' which by the way, that's fine in Republican circles, but there are a lot of Democrats who sort of bristle at using the term 'ObamaCare'," Acosta explained on Wednesday after Mitt Romney used the term when addressing the Democratic-friendly NAACP. "We at CNN use the term 'the President's health care law,' at least in our news reporting," Acosta boasted. [Video below the break. Audio here.]
That is not the case, according to CNN's own reporting on the Supreme Court's decision on the health care law:
When news broke of the Court's decision on June 28, anchor Wolf Blitzer said to a guest that "the bottom line, John, seems to be that 'ObamaCare,' as it's called, is in fact constitutional."
Soon after the decision, correspondent Casey Wian asked a citizen of Stockton, California "Don, what did you think when the Supreme Court decided to uphold ObamaCare?"
That afternoon, anchor Brooke Baldwin posed this question to Sen. Olympia Snowe: "What's so unique to your story and your voting record is you actually did not vote for ObamaCare when it went to the full Senate, but you did vote for it in committee. Why?"
The next morning, anchor Ashleigh Banfield opened the 5 a.m. hour of Early Start by reporting "A historic day for health care in America. ObamaCare upheld."
And on the June 29 edition of The Situation Room, anchor Candy Crowley said that "Mitt Romney is vowing to get rid of ObamaCare despite the Supreme Court ruling upholding it."
On Thursday morning, Acosta did admit that "there are some Democrats who sort of like that term," which is not what he emphasized the day before. "I mean, there have been some Democrats who have said we like the term 'ObamaCare,' because it almost sounds like 'Obama Cares'," he told anchor Carol Costello.
Costello had pressed him into admitting that when she said Vice President Joe Biden should express his "love" for "ObamaCare" in the first line of his Thursday address to the NAACP.
"And the other thing he [Biden] will probably pick up and run with, of course, Mitt Romney was booed when he said he would repeal 'ObamaCare,' and he used that term 'ObamaCare.' Maybe Joe Biden's first line should be about how we love ObamaCare – not we, per se, but the African-Americans in the audience," Costello suggested on Thursday morning.
