Yesterday's
D.C. Circuit Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act was a significant one, in that one of the nation's leading conservative judges rejected the premise that the law's mandate is unconstitutional. Given that, you'd expect some prominent coverage of the story in traditional media, right? Particularly since the Supreme Court is currently weighing which, if any, of the challenges to the law to take up.
If that's what you expected, you expected wrong. Steve Benen returns to his ongoing feature of reviewing traditional media coverage of health care court rulings and finds, yet again that the media just isn't that interested in the rulings in support of the law.
The trend, in other words, continues: conservative rulings receive more coverage, longer articles, and better placement, regardless of merit. The Washington Post continues to be the most one-sided—the three conservative rulings were all treated as front-page news, while the five rulings in support of the law were either buried or ignored. [...]
The news-consuming public doesn’t necessarily follow the details of these legal developments, and Americans find important what the media tells them is important. With that in mind, it seems very likely the public has been left with the impression that the health care law is legally dubious and struggling badly in the courts because that's what news organizations have told them to believe—rulings the right likes get trumpeted; rulings the left likes get downplayed.
That perception gives fuel to the Republicans' efforts to paint the law as a massive government overreach and to their efforts to scale back or fully repeal the law. Not that that's going to happen with a Democratic Senate and inevitable veto, but it gives oxygen to an increasingly dishonest and probably futile debate. It also allows for Republican distraction from the issues that really matter right now, like jobs, the economy and income inequality. As usual.