Friday, April 18, 2014

It's a tough moment for right-wing fake-news media -- time to change the subject?

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"We think just a look at a few of this week’s health-care related headlines provides the best summary: the ACA is working." This is the "bottom line" in this evening's ThinkProgress report, "The Thing Is Working." (For working linnks, you'll have to visit the site.)

by Ken

In a "Progress Report" post this evening, "This Thing Is Working," the crew in the CAP War Room reports: "A Slew Of Good Health Care News Has Conservatives On Their Heels," with news like "19 Million Americans Covered," "Exchanges Working And Costs Down," and "Conservatives On Defense."

On the latter front, the post notes:
As millions of people experience real, and not just theoretical, benefits of the law, Americans are getting more and more tired of the political battles to repeal it. A recent Kaiser survey found that 59 percent of Americans want keep the law in place or improve it, while only 29 percent want get rid of it. Pew reports that even a “majority of ACA opponents – representing 30% of the public overall – want politicians to do what they can to make the law work as well as possible, compared with 19% of the public that wants elected officials to do what they can to make it fail.”

And constituents are showing their frustration with their conservative elected officials’ fixation on repeal. Without any alternative to point to, and an increasingly frustrated public, these politicians have nobody to blame but themselves.
The post even offers the sampling checklist of upbeat ACA-related headlines at the top of this post.


ALL OF WHICH IS A SERIOUS DOWNER
FOR THE RIGHT-WING NOISEMAKERS


As we were discussing last night ("Instead of apologizing for their lies, the lying liars of Fox Noise simply tell . . . new lies!"), with regard to the incredibly silly Fox Noise "report" about the great "surprise": that people who didn't sign up for Obamacare by March 31 -- meaning, among others, people who listened to the constant stream of end-of-the-world pronouncements from Fox Noisemakers and got the obvious message that they shouldn't sign up -- now can't sign up until, well, some terribly distant time like, you know, fall or something.

Of course there was nothing in the least "surprising" about this, since everyone knew that after the March 31 deadline insurance wouldn't be obtainable via the exchanges until the next registration period -- everyone, that is except, apparently, for the Right-Wing Noisemakers, who don't seem even to have wondered what that "deadline" might be the deadline for. And of course the logic of fixed enrollment periods is thoroughly well established in the insurance world, so that people can't simply wait till the day they decide they actually need coverage to sign up.

This was all known to everyone who even dabbled in the ACA signup story -- except, again, the right-wing noisemakers who are either too stupid or too dishonest to do the simplest basic job of actual reporters. As in this head you may recall from last night:




I had actually thought about making some little joke, wishing poor Jim Angle good luck in his next career, whatever it may be, since he obviously isn't cut out for reporting. It got a little confusing, though, because I would have wanted to make clear that I don't think his job is actual reporting, but that this is even a lousy job of fake-news reporting. It has the necessary virtue of touching the kinds of buttons Right-Wing Noisemakers love to touch among news-challenged viewers, and usually do so successfully. But this story collapses so completely in even the dimmest light of reality, and that's not really good enough for good fake-news.

Really the only solution the Right-Wing Noise Machine has come up with for when reality turns against them this cruelly is the extreme one: ignore it. I think we may be seeing some big-time news-ignoring in the days and weeks to come, and some big-time efforts of subject-changing.
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