Media Critique: Obamacare

picture that accompanied the fox news article

photo that accompanied the cnn article

Now, The Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) has been all over the news lately, and it is honestly hard to find unbiased reporting on the issue. In some articles, such as this one from Fox News the reporting is obviously leaning more towards the conservative side, whereas in this on from CNN the reporting is generally on the liberal side of things. It's even possible to tell this from the picture/video they included at he top of the articles. These were both front page stories too. The Fox News story focuses mostly on how it is (supposedly) hurting the job market, and they also used words with negative connotations to them such as '"Obama tried to counter "misinformation" about the law, and noted: "If you already have health care, you don't have to do anything."' The CNN article focused more on the positive aspects, and only told about the good things coming from it and they told a story about that woman in the picture and how she would be able to afford healthcare with Obamacare. They should have listed some pros and cons, and let people decide what they thought about it themselves. This clearly violates one of the seven basic yardsticks of journalism, fairness. This yardstick "measures whether reporters get at least one other side in controversies or reports of wrong-doing." These rules should not be that hard to follow, and yet we see reporters and the media as a whole breaking them all the time.

Fairness in the media seems to be a much larger problem than it should be. Journalists need to stop putting forth their own political opinions in their writing, and leave their audience room to interpret the facts any way they please. Something these journalist could have done to improve these stories is to list the pros and the cons, even though they might believe one way, they need to be loyal to their readers and the reader deserves the whole truth, and not just an opinion-soaked version of it.

(In case you are interested, here's an article that I found on USA Today that has the pros and cons of Obamacare)