The ACA [Obamacare] is alive and growing—and Year 2 of enrollment is going quite well, but you’d never know that if you get your news from the usual suspects: Mainstream media outlets have, essentially, put this story on blackout.

In October 2013, when the Affordable Care Act starting taking enrollments, everyone jumped all over the faulty healthcare.gov website and predicted disaster for the program. The reports of website screw-ups were right. But the predictions of catastrophic failure of the program were all wrong. And, by the end of the first open enrollment period, more than 7 million people had signed up, reducing the nation’s uninsured rate significantly.

According to Politico:

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 9.5 million fewer adults are uninsured now than at the beginning of the [first year ] Obamacare enrollment season. The Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey found a similar drop, with 8 million adults gaining coverage. And Gallup-Healthways survey reported that the uninsured rate has fallen to 13.4 percent of adults, the lowest level since it began tracking health coverage in 2008.

This year, open enrollment began on November 15, and, in contrast to Year 1, it’s going smoothly. Nearly 30 days into Year two, 1.3 million have signed up–of which about half are new enrollees. [Check out ACAsignups.com for in-depth, independent reporting and daily updates.] No major problems, nothing for ACA opponents to crow and gloat about. So, no news reports, even though anniversaries and one-year look-backs are standard news hooks, and even though the contrast with Year 1 is a legitimate story.

This year, there’s no disaster, no right-wing talking points—just success. Nobody is feeding anti-Obamacare press releases to the media, nobody’s trumping up failure stories to run on Fox News. So, the mainstream media is yawning. Apparently, the success of a program pushed by President Obama—and beneficial to millions of Americans—is not a news story.

The absence of reporting on this year’s ACA enrollments is indicative of a couple of things, I think. First, it demonstrates how much influence the Republican propaganda machine has had on mainstream news: With no major anti-ACA propaganda push this year, there’s simply no news. Hmmm.

Second—and this is the positive part of the story—the lack of reporting on the successful second-year rollout may simply indicate that Obamacare is quickly becoming a fact of life in this country—accepted by millions of people, viewed as a beneficial government program, and becoming more popular as people understand how it works and what it can do for them and their families. I still contend, though, that this phenomenon is, in itself, a news story that merits attention,

I can see why the media has lost interest—it doesn’t bleed, and it’s working. Ho hum, I guess.

The only ACA storyline that continues to be of interest to the media is the frivolous Supreme Court case—spitefully filed by the Republican Party—that pounces on a drafting error in the law, regarding federal subsidies for ACA enrollees. Unfortunately, the media is not reporting the case as the mean-spirited, who-cares-if-millions-of-people-suffer, purely political, anti-Obama maneuver that it is. It will be news because it’s nasty and confrontational, and because the right-wing will make it easy to report by supplying talking points that can be read verbatim.

It’s a sad and shameful state of affairs.

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In a turn of events that will shock no one, “fair and balanced” news source, Fox News, was discovered to be using incorrect data on a graphic during one of its regular news shows. The image in question reported that unemployment in 2009 was 7.8% and that in 2012 it was now 14.7%. It’s a shocking change in numbers, particularly because it’s false.

Media Matters called Fox out on the deception by pulling up the old national employment rate (7.8% in January 2009) and the current national unemployment rate, which is 8.1%. So where did the other number come from? As Media Matters reports,

“The 14.7 percent figure is a completely different measurement of the unemployed, which in addition to those who are actively looking for work, also counts people who are unemployed and discouraged from looking for a new job, part-time workers who prefer full-time employment, and more. This alternative measure of unemployment, which conservatives often call the “real” unemployment rate, was 14.2 percent in January 2009 — 0.5 percentage points lower than it is today.”

It’s one thing to have a typo. It’s another to mix together two different sets of numbers to create a misleading statistic. That’s not reporting the news, it’s lying. And Fox has fudged the numbers on employment numerous times before. A day later, Fox and Friends issued a correction for the graphic. If they are serious about making amends, they should stop their pattern of spreading misinformation and trying to pass it off as the truth.

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The map above (blue = Democratic and red = Republican) shows voting shifts from 2004 to 2008. According to corporate-owned-media pundits, America is a “center-right” nation. We hear this repeated so often by talking heads on both the right and left, it’s easy to assume it’s true. Yet, for years, polls have shown that Americans, if anything, are solidly progressive in their policy attitudes. This collection of poll results is from Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics by Paul Street (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). Street in turn, summarized them from a chapter in The New Feminized Majority by Katherine Adams and Charles Derber (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

The polls cited are a few years old and were taken during the Bush administration. In the meantime, we have elected a Democratic President and given Democratic majorities to both Houses, suggesting that the progressive trend continues. The map shows a blue country, not a red country. And these polls show why the country shifted blue in 2008.

69 percent of U.S. voters agree that, “government should care for those who cannot care for themselves.” (Pew Research, 2007)

54 percent of voters agree that, “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.” (Pew Research, 2007)

58 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government should be doing more for its citizens, not less. (National Elections Survey, 2004)

64 percent of Americans would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens (CNN Opinion Research Poll, May 2007)

69 percent of Americans think it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide health coverage to all U. S. citizens. (Gallup Poll, 2006)

80 percent of Americans support a government mandated increase in the minimum wage. (Associated Press/AOL Poll, December 2006)

86 percent of Americans want Congress to pass legislation to raise the federal minimum wage (CNN, August 2006)

71 percent of Americans think that taxes on corporations are too low. (Gallup Poll, April 2007)

66 percent of Americans think taxes on upper-income people are too low. (Gallup Poll, 2006)

52 percent of Americans generally side with unions in labor disputes. Just 34 percent side with management. (Gallup Poll, 2006)

57 percent of Americans want to keep abortion legal in all or most cases. (Washington Post/ABC News 2007)

78 percent of Americans think “women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry, and government.” (National Elections Survey, 2004)

57 percent of Americans support programs which “give special preference to qualified women and minorities in hiring. (Pew Poll, 2003)

A majority of American voters think that the United States’ “most urgent moral question” is either “greed or materialism” (33 percent) or “poverty and economic injustice” (31 percent). Just 16 percent identify abortion and 12 percent pick gay marriage as the nation’s “most urgent moral question.” (Zogby, 2004.) Thus, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the population think that injustice and inequality are the nation’s leading “moral issues.”

67 percent of Americans think the U.S. should emphasize diplomatic and economic means over military methods in combating terrorism. (Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs, 2007)

Just 15 percent of Americans think the U.S. should play “the leading role in the world” (Gallup Poll, February 2007)—a remarkable rejection of U.S. global hegemony and empire.

58 percent of Americans think the U.S. should play “a major role but not the leading role in the world” (Gallup Poll. February 2007)

62 percent of Americans in September of 2007 thought the invasion of Iraq was “a mistake.” (CBS News, September 2007)

A majority of Americans want a firm deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. (Washington Post/ABC News, February, 2007)

70 percent of Americans want a multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty (Pew Poll, November 2005)

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