Why did the self described fact checkers of the main stream media not fact check Obama's claims about Obamacare? The lie heard 'round the country was Obama's infamous remark that if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan.
Perhaps it proves the theory that if you repeat something so many times people will believe it. In any case, some writers have tried to explain away why the media didn't do anything until now.
Brendan Nyhan attempts to explain it in The failure to factcheck ‘You can keep it’. There he points to two reasons. First, they weren't interested in policy. And second, because the media need to be fed by a "reality-based opposition," which in this case he said was lacking.
That second problem is the biggest. We know the mainstream media puts too much reliance on Democrat talking points. But their skepticism of Republican policies blinds them to reality. So if they are getting their news from the opposition they need to overcome their innate biases.
For a better analysis of the problem see Matt Welch's Obamacare Media Fail: Did the President ‘Work the Refs’?.
The Obama administration has been deliberately and skillfully “working the refs,” playing into the media’s natural suspicion of Republican misinformation and exploiting its regrets over Harry & Louise, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and Elizabeth McCaughey. ...
Now here's the rub: Barack Obama and his handlers (including many top former journalists) know all this, speak that language, and use it to feed into journalists' pre-existing suspicion that conservatives have a uniquely nasty habit of telling untruths. ...
So instead of diving into the factual claims of a sitting president trying to wrestle through a major piece of domestic legislation, journalists spent thousands of column inches and hundreds of academic hours dissecting a single Facebook post by Sarah Palin. Instead of investigating the stated policy fears of anti-Obamacare townhall participants in the summer of 2009, many commentators chose to interpret those worries as unstated racism, and make wildly inaccurate predictions about an upsurge in right-wing violence. And at every step of the way, the president made sure to couple his own truth-bending efforts with journalist-pleasing claims denouncing "misinformation" and false equivalence. As recently as yesterday, the White House blog had the temerity to issue a "fact-check" correcting misapprehensions about the Obamacare rollout.
Oh, that liberal bias.
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