In yet another attempt to turn their audience into blithering idiots, the Fox Nationalists have posted the results of a CNN poll on ObamaCare with a thoroughly misleading headline and commentary: “Poll: Majority of Americans Oppose ObamaCare.”
For more Fox Nation mangling of the truth, get the acclaimed book,
Fox Nation vs. Reality
Rather than linking to the actual poll results on CNN’s web site, Fox Nation links to a little known blog, Red Alert Politics, an affiliate of Clarity Media. Ultra-rightist billionaire Philip Anschutz owns Clarity as well as the conservative Weekly Standard. The excerpt that Fox extracts from Red Alert says merely that “54 percent of Americans still do not support President Obama’s signature domestic policy, compared to the 43 percent of Americans who support it.”
Not surprisingly, that is not the whole story – or even an honest representation of the limited story. A cursory glance at CNN’s web site fills in the details that Fox has deliberately suppressed. Although CNN also distorts the lede, at least they include the data that puts the poll’s results into context:
“A majority of Americans still oppose the nation’s new health care measure, three years after it became law, according to a new survey.
“But a CNN/ORC International poll released Monday also indicates that more than a quarter of those who oppose the law, known by many as Obamacare, say they don’t support the measure because it doesn’t go far enough.”
In other words, many of those who are being counted as opponents are actually supporters of a more liberal national health care plan. In a rational world, these people would not be lumped in with the Tea-publicans who want to repeal ObamaCare. They would be regarded as supporters who advocate an even more comprehensive policy.
Since 43% of respondents said that they support ObamaCare, and another 16% said that they support a more liberal version of it, a more accurate presentation of the poll’s results would say that 59% of Americans were in favor of the legislation – including some who want it to go further – and only 35% were opposed. That’s a solid majority of supporters.
But it may be too much to expect that Fox could grasp the complexities of math after they spent the last couple of years rejecting it along with pretty much every other principle of science and academia.
Obama care doesn’t really kick in until next year and when it does and people begin to see how it will help them with the health care fiasco in this country, support for it will rise. This is what the opponents of Obama care are really afraid of. They pulled out every trick to stop it before and after passage. The states that opt in vs those that will opt out, like Texas, will see the difference, and if the people are paying attention they will see how they are not being served by the politicians like Rick Perry who remain adamantly opposed to progress that benefits the common good. That’s when the rubber meets the road and hopefully we can make Obama care better. It’s a start at least.
I just hope they don’t frig it up or water it down any more between now and then!
Agreed. At this point the Teapubs aren’t concerned about their own failure…they’re just terrified that a working Obamacare system will put the final nail in the entire right-wing coffin in 2016 and beyond. They know damned good and well it’s not going to bring down society…more likely, people are going to complain because it didn’t go far ENOUGH toward creating a Canada-style healthcare system.