Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple reported that fired New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson feels “liberated” to say that the media’s failing to offer “big coverage” of how Obamacare is now working.
In an interview, Times media reporter David Carr spoke about Ebola:
He said, “We’ve come to believe that our government doesn’t know what it’s doing almost never. And we don’t trust ‘em. We don’t trust ‘em to handle it. . . . The president has a really bold, grand plan to insure everybody and the thing rolls out and just face-plants. You know, it doesn’t work.”
“Yeah, and now the computers are working and lots of people are signing up, and where’s all the big coverage of that story?” asked Abramson, who was sacked in the spring from her job atop the New York Times newsroom and is exploring a news start-up with Steve Brill. “See, I can now speak my mind; it’s very liberating.”
Wemple added:
Liberating perhaps, though not necessarily precise. Indeed, the media jumped on the failures of Obamacare when it rolled out one year ago. HealthCare.gov, the government’s portal for routing folks to the various health-insurance plans under Obamacare, sputtered and failed and crashed over and over again, spawning a number of quick-twitch investigative stories on all the missteps of the Obama administration in launching its signature social initiative.
And Abramson is correct that the administration recovered. By last spring, about 8 million folks had chosen plans, a number that exceeded Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, not to mention the snide comments of the program’s many, many critics.
One of the reasons that Abramson isn’t finding tons of coverage of the program right now is that open enrollment ended last April, so things have been quiet. Yet don’t for a minute allow Abramson to convince you that the killer spring enrollment figures were somehow underreported. They were not.
