It took just a couple of sentences for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to destroy the media myth that the Affordable Care Act is doomed on ABC’s This Week.
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WRIGHT: And there’s the program where the president himself admits the government blew it, big time. The troubled website, health care.gov. What advice would you have for the president on his poor website?
ZUCKERBERG: You know, sometimes stuff doesn’t work when you want it to. We’ve certainly had plenty of mistakes and things that haven’t worked the way that we want to. The right thing here is just to keep on focusing on building the service that you think is right in the long-term.
Well, that certainly wasn’t the answer that ABC News was looking for. Notice the bias in the ABC News piece. ABC called the website troubled without admitting that most of the problems have already been fixed. ABC was hoping that Zuckerberg would feed into their narrative that website is a horrible disaster, but instead the Facebook founder told them the truth.
The problems that the website had really aren’t a big deal. Anyone who works online knows that sometimes things break. Sometimes things don’t work the way you want them to, but people don’t abandon their long term goals because of a tech problem. You fix the problem, and move on.
The media refuses to move on.
To them, the website hasn’t changed at all since the first week of October. They keep acting like the ACA website is still broken even though it isn’t. The issues with the website were never going to be the end of the ACA. The website was always going to be fixed. People were and are going to sign up.
Zuckerberg was right. The problems with the website rollout have nothing to do with reforming the health insurance system. The media is wrong. The Republicans are wrong. The goal is still there, and Democrats are close to making the historic reform of our broken healthcare system a reality.
The media is rooting for the ACA to fail, but just like the Republicans that they are taking their lead from, they will be the ones who live with the bitter taste of failure.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
