The Media Is Massively Failing on the AHCA

Unlike email server management or people asking for diplomatic passports and being turned down, the media does not see an attempt to strip health care from 23 million people using an opaque process major news. JMM has a good explanation:

We almost certainly know the gist of the impact of this bill, when we figure the political and budgetary parameters Senate Republicans are operating in and the eventual need to pass a bill that emerges from a conference committee through both houses of Congress.

McConnell is taking shrewd advantage of the particular hang-ups and thought processes of most Democrats and many journalists, how they get tangled up in policy literalism and boxed out of being able to speak clearly about the political reality that is coming. To be more specific, even if they don’t quite get that this is happening, many Democrats think that there’s nothing to discuss or attack since we don’t know the fine print of the legislation despite the fact that its broad scope and impact are clear.

To look at this from another perspective, do you think if Democrats were on the verge of passing a bill, the outlines and impact of which were clear, but were keeping the legislative text secret that Republicans would be finding themselves hamstrung about raising a public stink about the bill? Of course not. Indeed, they’d be death paneling it on top of whatever was actually true about the legislation. Caring about policy, caring about the lives of people affected by legislative decision is a good thing – it’s critical to democratic self-government. But it has the byproduct or side-effect of policy literalism which is politically catastrophic. I say ‘politically’ both in the sense of winning political fights but also in the more general sense of allowing political debates in which citizens have concrete factual information upon which to make decisions. The first is only relevant to partisans; the second is highly relevant for journalists too.

Media norms that it’s only news is part of the explanation, but only part of it. If Obama and Reid had tried anything like this it sure as hell would have been major news even if there was no finished text to write about — Fred Hiatt would be calling for Obama’s impeachment daily. As a corollary to Murc’s dictum about how to the media only Democrats have agency, only Democrats are actually expected to adhere to norms.

Whatever the explanation, the media failed massively on health care during the campaign, and it’s failing massively again. Maybe it wouldn’t matter — but as Josh says, it was the wave of negative coverage generated by the CBO score that stopped the first House attempt. And whatever the outcome, this is a hugely important story the public should be informed about.