Opponents of Health Care Law Won 'Messaging War' in News Coverage

[SpartanDem]

June 19, 2012
After helping define the Obama presidency for almost a year, health care reform largely disappeared as a subject in the American news media as it wended its way through the legal system to the Supreme Court.

When it was a major story, however, most of the coverage focused on the politics of the bill rather than the substance of the legislation. And the language and framing of the issue favored by the bill’s Republican critics was far more prevalent in the news coverage than the language and framing favored by Democrats supporting the bill, according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Health care reached its heights as a news story in the summer of 2009 and early 2010, during the rise of the tea party and the battles in the House and Senate over passage of the legislation. In the third quarter of 2009, with passions fueled by angry town hall meetings, coverage of the health care debate filled 18% of the newshole, according to PEJ’s News Coverage Index, making it the No. 1 story in the news. That number fell slightly but remained high in the last quarter of 2009 (13%) and the first quarter of 2010 (14%).

http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/how_media_has_covered_health_care_debate

[JoeyT]

1. Yeah, it's the media's fault that our messaging sucked.

So anyone else remember near the end when we were suddenly supposed to shift from telling people how much insurance companies sucked and why they sucked and highlighting stories about how much they sucked to insisting the best thing for people was to be chained to them forever for no particularly good reason? Wasn't that awesome?

The absolute worst thing the media could have done for us was put our message out there. Our message was incoherent.

[TomCADem]

2. Classic MSM Talking Point - Blame Bias On Democrats

Look at the recent wins by socialist in France, which is getting very little coverage in the U.S. compared to conservative wins in Europe a few years ago. Is it because the left is losing the message war as though the left just needs a better PR strategy?

Or, is it that corporate media is trying to cover up their corporate bias by not only spreading the myth of a liberal media, but also pushing the meme that the reason why corporate media is biased is because of the poor PR strategy of the left?

I guess all we need is the right PR guy and Sean Hannity would be saying the same thing as Rachel Maddow.