When AlterNet reporter Eric Stern saw Sean Hannity’s report on Obamacare horror stories, he decided to check it out. Hannity presented three married couples who claimed to have been harmed by the new Affordable Care Act. Stern, who has worked as a senior ACA implementation advisor to a governor, decided to track down those families to get more details, and he wrote about what he found out. Here’s a link to his full article, “Fox News coverage about Obamacare was extremely misleading,” which debunks virtually everything in the Fox News feature.
I’m not saying that ACA is going to be perfect for everyone, but Stern’s fact-checking shows several things: The right-wing propaganda machine has done a great job of scaring people off—so much so that people who could be benefiting from Obamacare are not even bothering to find out about it. Also, it doesn’t take much to find out that most of the anti-Obamacare hype is false—and, worse yet, Fox knows that.
Kudos to Stern for going the extra step—oh, wait, isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?