Can White House propaganda be extreme enough the Main Stream Media will actually avoid participation? Personally, I doubt it because the example of Benghazi Cover hangs too recent in memory.
However, there is such a thing as trying too hard; as in – trying so hard to keep up favorable appearances that your own credibility becomes dangerously at risk of ridicule.
[Again, I find it difficult to believe there is *any* level of White House propaganda so extreme the adoring media would ever call it out. Because if such a sense or possibility even existed, they would most certainly have done so by now.]
All of that said, there does appear to be something, something unusual, something quite different, with this Obamacare fiasco. Even CBS New’s Political Director John Dickerson says it could lead to a “credibility death spiral”:
On CBS this morning, Dickerson presented a rather bleak context for the president’s Obamacare presser today. Dickerson says the president’s primary goals for this morning’s healthcare address are to defend against the barrage of bad press about the “total fiasco” of the program’s rollout and to attempt to encourage younger, healthy customers to enroll (to present the “death spiral” of the whole program).
But the major problem, Dickerson argued, is the problem of the president’s plummeting credibility. Obama’s suffering more than just “a political black-eye” or the setbacks of a few “glitches.” The president’s repeated false promises that Americans could keep their current health plans, that the new system had been “tested up and down,” and that the enrollment issues were just minor technical issues all simply “didn’t turn out be true”:
It’s one false promise after another.
The result, Dickerson argued, could be a “credibility death spiral” for the administration. (link)
I have never seen so many rapid response fact-checkers in the blogosphere before. There are so many fact-checkers deconstructing every single propaganda word – perhaps that is what Dickerson is alluding to.
Like I said, there are thousands of people zero’d in on this issue and the propaganda behind Obamacare. WeaselZippers has been doing yeoman’s work with exposing the people behind the commercials and messaging. Here are a few examples of their work.
Daniel McNaughton is one of only two Floridians who have claimed they fully enrolled in Obamacare. And he just happens to be a Democratic operative, what are the odds of that?
Florida media outlets have diligently attempted to identify anybody who has been able to access the federal government’s Affordable Care Act health exchanges and sign up for Obamacare insurance coverage. The Miami Herald this week claimed it “searched high and low” for such people, even posting notices on its website and in its printed newspaper inviting Obamacare enrollees to contact the Herald and tell their stories. Despite their efforts, the Herald could not identify a single person responding to its efforts.
The Orlando Sentinel is the only media outlet that has found a person who claims to have successfully obtained Obamacare insurance. The Sentinel reports that Valencia College student Daniel McNaughton claims to have obtained insurance on the exchange. A pro-Obamacare liberal advocacy group, Florida CHAIN, claims a second person, 24-year-old college student Vincent Mutia, also signed up for Obamacare on the federal government website.
In reporting on McNaughton, the Sentinel correctly identifies him as a Valencia College student. What the Sentinel either failed to discover, or decided not to mention, is that McNaughton is a former Democratic Party political operative.
On McNaughton’s LinkedIn page, he reports that he spent much of 2009 working in the office of former Florida Democratic state Sen. Dave Aronberg. Last November, Aronberg won an election on the Democratic Party ticket for Palm Beach County State Attorney. According to McNaughton’s LinkedIn page, he performed various tasks for Aronberg, including handling Aronberg’s correspondence. (link)
The Second Commercial is even more egregious in its level of Pravda-like manipulative messaging:
“Deborah, 54″ is Deborah Lielasus, 54, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Deborah is a grant writer who has gotten grants for clients from the DOJ, HUD, and NEA among others.
Turns out that it wasn’t quite as easy as Deborah portrayed it in the ad. In fact, according to Deborah’s interview with the AP back on October 2, she only got as far as creating an account before the website stopped working. Of course, the ad makes no mention of this.
In addition to talking about how easy the site was to use, Deborah also notes in the ad that her premiums and deductible will be lower under Obamacare than what she had been paying. What is not mentioned is that Deborah is not the usual consumer. Deborah has a significant pre-existing condition.
According to Seacoast Online:
Lielasus, 54, currently spends about $8,500 a year in premiums and more than $10,000 for out-of-pocket expenses because she has a health condition and her only option has been the state’s high-risk insurance pool. Her husband also is self-employed, and the COBRA continuation coverage he has now will run out in December.
So of course, even the ridiculously expensive Obamacare premiums and deductibles that have been reported might seem less. Since she doesn’t state her situation and doesn’t talk in actual numbers in the ad, you are left to think that Deborah is the norm and you too will have lower premiums and deductibles.
In fact, as we found out with our experiments on the site and interviews with others who have tried it, the premiums are significantly higher in most cases and the deductibles are ridiculous. Most of the discussion has centered on the premiums. But if, as reported, deductibles are running as much as five to six thousand dollars, what normal healthy young person would pay that. For the young healthy person, the person Obamacare is seeking to grab to sustain the system, it is not practical. That young person, like our tester, who makes less than Deborah and her husband, would likely end up subsidizing Deborah since the government probably would not since she and her husband likely make too much money. (link)
We know conclusively the web design was specifically intended to stop people from seeing the costs if they were just wanted to do cost comparisons of Obamacare VS. the free market insurance options available. The goal is to keep people from finding out how expensive this entire construct of a fraudulent healthcare bill actually is.
But the bigger question is: will the tactic to hide the cost actually work?
In New York, one of only 16 states that has its own exchange, not one person had succeeded in using the site to enroll in a plan as of Friday.
Donna Frescatore, director of the New York State of Health marketplace, said Friday that 134,000 people had registered and shopped on the state’s online health care site since its Oct. 1 launch, and thousands signed up to enroll in a plan.
But the state has repeatedly delayed electronically transmitting those users’ data to insurers offering health plans.
The department, which held off in order to verify the accuracy of the information users submitted, said it would transfer the first batch of enrollees’ data — which includes thousands of transactions — as early as Friday night.
Meanwhile, insurers were worried that the state website had incorrect information on details of plans that are available. (link)
So what do you think. Will the media continue covering for President Obama, even at the risk of losing what little credibility they may still have? Or, will they cut their losses, unhitch their water-carrying wagon, report on the fraud and the propaganda messaging, and watch the White House circle the drain?
What say you?
