For quite a while now the main story the media wants to report is that American oppose the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) -- leaving the impression that a majority of Americans would like to see Obamacare repealed. Several polls have shown this is just not true, and hasn't been true for quite a while now -- but the media doesn't seem to be interested in delving below the surface to see the real story.
The latest example of this superficial (and deceptive) reporting comes from a news organization that usually does a better job than most in reporting the truth -- National Public Radio (NPR). NPR commissioned Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner to do a poll, and some of the questions in that poll were about Obamacare. The chart above shows what NPR reported about the poll -- that 51% of the public opposed Obamacare and 47% supported it.
That reporting is disingenuous at best, and borders on being an outright lie. It leaves the listener with the impression that a majority want to see Obamacare go away (be repealed) -- and that is NOT what the poll actually said. It makes me wonder whether NPR actually read their own poll, or whether they no longer care about getting a story right.
Even a casual reading of that poll will show that the majority actually wants Obamacare stay in effect (with 47% approving of it as it is and another 7% wanting it to go even further, for a total of 54%), while only 44% oppose it because they think it went to far. That's a 10 point gap in favor of keeping Obamacare. To lump the 7% who think Obamacare didn't go far enough with the 44% who think it went too far is to mislead the public about what the real situation is on Obamacare. That 7% (which I am in) doesn't want Obamacare repealed -- they want to make it much stronger.
I'm very disappointed in the poor job of reporting that NPR did on this story. They used to hold themselves to a higher standard than others. They should be ashamed of themselves, since they have lowered themselves to the Fox News standard.
While I'm on the subject of Obamacare, here are the latest numbers:
The Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner Poll was done between March 19th and 23rd of 1790 nationwide voters, and has a margin of error of 3.18 points.
The only number you read about is the 7.1 million signed up, through the exchanges while the real number of new people signed up in total is nearly 21 million, or almost 3 times as many. That's the number that should be reported!
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