The committed Obama PR flacks at the broadcast news networks are experts at using biased terminology. When President Obama and the Democrats changed the health care system it was consistently presented as “reform,” but reporters rarely used the word when President Trump and the Republicans try to pass health care legislation.
From March 6 (the first introduction of this health care legislation in the House of Representatives) until June 27 when the vote was originally scheduled to be held, the evening news shows of ABC, CBS and NBC only referred to the GOP health care plan as “reform” 30 times. In a contrast that is nothing short of ridiculous, in the equivalent time frame in 2009 (ending with the Senate passing that bill) these same networks referred to Obamacare as “reform” 344 times – more than 11 times as much. Long before it was announced that the Senate vote on the latest version of the GOP health care plan was postponed until after Independence Day, the networks began laying the groundwork for their coverage of that vote.
CBS Evening News had the most skewed coverage, with only 6 uses of that term for the GOP plan (the least of any network) and 132 uses for Obamacare (the most of any network): 22 times as much.
The health care reporting was optimistic back during the Obama years. “Health care reform is aimed at helping the millions of Americans with no insurance,” Brian Williams said on NBC Nightly News on October 23, 2009. On September 21, 2009, CBS Evening News correspondent Chip Reid called Obamacare “another issue of life and death.”
In contrast, network journalists never missed an opportunity to slam the GOP health care bill in 2017. On June 22, NBC Nightly News blamed the failures in ObamaCare on Trump’s rhetoric “fueling market turmoil.” When ObamaCare passed the House of Representatives in 2009, the networks lauded it as “historic” and a “milestone.” But when the GOP bill passed the House in early May of 2017, it was a “big risk” and “extreme.”
This fits with the network trend of systematically ignoring ObamaCare’s failures. In 2016, ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News failed to spend even a single second of coverage on ObamaCare’s failures the entire year, as premiums rose and insurance companies pulled out, until Bill Clinton’s gaffe on October 3 when he called the Affordable Care Act “this crazy system.”
