The major health insurance provider Aetna announced that it would be pulling out of the last two states where it still participated in Obamacare. Yet, the morning news shows of ABC and NBC completely ignored this important news story, while CBS This Morning gave it a mere 25 seconds.
This continues a longstanding network news tradition of defending the Affordable Care Act and ignoring its failures.
In a study released on October 28, 2016, the MRC’s Bias by the Minute project detailed how the evening news shows on these three networks routinely ignored or barely covered Obamacare’s failures during that year. Back in August of 2016, when Aetna announced it was planning to start pulling out of Obamacare after losing $300 million, CBS Evening News was the only broadcast evening show to even mention it. Earlier in that year, when United Healthcare announced it would pull out in all but a “handful of states” and that it would be “dramatically scaling back its involvement” in Obamacare, only CBS picked up the story, and only for a fleeting 23 seconds on April 19.