With the United States Supreme Court set to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama administration's 2010 health care reform law, it's worth noting the media coverage at the time of the debate dramatically favored Republican opponents of the bill. The Pew Research Center recently reminded us of that fact when it highlighted the findings of a comprehensive survey they conducted from June 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.
But it turns out the Pew study likely downplayed just how dramatically media outlets aided and amplified Republican attacks on health care reform, even though Republicans were on the losing side of that legislative showdown. (Since when do losers get to write the history?)
That's because the Pew study didn't effectively capture the run-away misinformation and ceaseless health-care reform attacks that flowed from Fox News during the debate.
The study assessed the extent to which certain terms associated with support for and opposition to health-care reform found their way into media coverage of the debate. According to Pew's results, "concepts used by opponents were nearly twice as common as those used by supporters."
From the Pew study:
"Terms that were closely associated with opposition arguments, such as 'government run,' were far more present in media reports than terms associated with arguments supporting the bill, such as 'pre-existing conditions.'"
Pew also noted that most of the coverage focused on the politics of the bill, not the substance of the landmark legislation. "Boiled down to its essence," the study concluded, "the opponents' attack on big government resonated more in the media than the supporters' attack on greedy insurance firms."
Basically, the news coverage of the health-care debate as provided by the "liberal media" represented a godsend to the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement. The coverage was stacked overwhelmingly in their favor in terms of the volume of GOP talking points stressed in the coverage.
In addition, the media obsessed over the legislative process and the political implications of the bill (49 percent of the coverage), while paying far less attention to how the reform legislation would affect Americans (23 percent), or why reform was even needed. In other words, how the U.S. health care system functions today (which accounted for just nine percent of the coverage).