One of the really irritating narratives to come out of the shutdown/debt ceiling debate is the idea that the shutdown drowned out coverage of the incompetence of the Obamacare exchanges. Funny, but the excellent Fox News program Special Report with Bret Baier managed to cover both stories. The failure of the exchanges is one of the easier stories to tell. All it takes is a journalist with a computer who is trying and failing (and failing . . . and failing) to sign up for the exchanges.
From a certain perspective, the failures of the Obamacare exchanges and the malicious administration attempts to harass the public by barricading open air monuments and trying to restrict roadside viewing of Mount Rushmore are not competing stories. They can both be seen as examples of the Obama team putting their political goals (making the shutdown as painful as possible and implementing the president’s signature law as quickly as possible) about sound public administration.
Obama was asked about neither the malicious monument closures nor the botched Obamacare exchanges at his press conference this week because of Ted Cruz I guess. This just show the ineptness of GOP because otherwise reporters would definitely have asked about those things (unless some Republican somewhere had done something . . . or said something . . . or there was unrest in the Middle East).
The worst part is that I don’t think there was conscious bad faith. I don’t think liberal reporters voiced an agreement to not ask about the Obamacare exchanges because it might hurt Obama. I think that the bad faith happens on the level of self-deception. Reporters who would recognize the murder of Matthew Shepard as a matter of national concern look at (or rather look away from) the Gosnell murders as a ” local crime story”.
This makes it all the more important for conservatives to work together to create channels to communicate with that majority of Americans who do not consume the conservative commercial media and therefore depend (if only passively) on liberal-leaning journalists and entertainers for their news. Even if it was only ninety seconds at a time for a couple of times a week it could make a big difference in how people understand public issues. And so much time and money has been wasted.
