ABC, NBC, and CBS Push Obamacare Lies then Deny Obama Airtime to Deliver The Facts

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ABC, CBS, and NBC all have been spreading Republican fueled ACA lies for years. After enrollment had shattered its goal, all three networks denied President Obama primetime airtime to discuss the facts.

Buzzfeed reported, “White House officials sought valuable primetime air for a rare, impromptu Tuesday night address to tout the accomplishment of signing up more than 7 million people under the Affordable Care Act. But network officials refused to make the kind of accommodation they did previously for the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, for instance, and Obama was left instead cutting into the much smaller audiences of Ellen and other daytime shows.”

At first glance, it may seem that the networks didn’t want to give the president a platform to report good news to the country, but a deeper look reveals the real reason why the broadcast networks had no interest in what the president had to say.

All three networks have been pushing Republican lies and talking points about the ACA for years.

ABC News spent the last quarter of 2013 declaring the ACA doomed after the website struggles. It was so bad that, in December of 2013, the ABC News website ran a headline that accused the Obama administration of lying about the state of the website.

CBS News’ former resident Republican plant, Jan Crawford did an Obamacare horror story piece that was so inaccurate that Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren corrected it on her show. When an anti-Obama hit piece is so off base that Fox News feels compelled to correct it, we’ve really jumped the shark.

Here is the piece of Republican propaganda that CBS put on their network:

Over on NBC, David Gregory spent months dishing out anti-ACA talking points as facts on Meet The Press. Gregory went so far as to claim that the website was still broken a month after it was fixed. 

The broadcast networks have bought completely into the ideas that the United States is a conservative country and that the American people want rid of the ACA. Election results and polling have no impact on their beliefs. The networks didn’t want to give President Obama primetime airtime, because his ACA announcement would be proof that they were wrong. The networks don’t want their viewers to start asking themselves why they were misled.

The truth is that just like when the networks blindly believed the Bush administration on invading Iraq, they listened to the Republicans, and were proven wrong again. Not giving President Obama the airtime allowed the networks to continue to live the lie a little longer.

It comes down to this. The networks were wrong about the ACA, and refused to do the right thing by the giving the president thirty minutes to discuss the success of the law. When the media is helping the Republican Party bury the truth, jou

Jason Easley

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