BY SHARON MARTIN
A recent article from Wall Street Cheat Sheet reported that under ObamaCare, health insurance premiums for the California market will be “more affordable than previously expected.” They added that “the subsidy provision of ObamaCare would sharply reduce costs for millions of Californians.”
Wow! And this was under the headline, “Will Young People Jeopardize the Success of ObamaCare?”
If you open up the Yahoo page each morning, you will see several negative headlines about the Affordable Care Act. Read the actual articles and you will begin to see that, almost without exception, the headlines are misleading.
The good news, numbers and facts, about ObamaCare get buried in the article.
How many busy people do you know who read only the headlines? If the headline lies, what effect does this have on public opinion?
Is it paranoia to believe that certain news entities have spinoffs whose jobs are to cause uncertainty about the Affordable Care Act? In fact, one such news organization had two negative articles on the Yahoo home page one day ostensibly from two different organizations. Only when one opened the stories did one see they both originated from the same place.
Who stands to gain if ObamaCare fails?
Sometimes the PR trick is even more subtle … and more insidious. Is it a stretch to believe that those who want ObamaCare to fail also want to see the president fail?
Allegedly a special needs middle school student was raped by a fellow student during gym class in a Los Angeles school. The news organization took great care to include the name of the prep school – Barack Obama Prep – in the headline and the first line of the story.
To protect identity of the minors, last names of the alleged victim and rapist were not used. By naming the school, however, their unusual first names should make them pretty easy to identify.
That leaves only one reason the name of the school was included in the headline: to link the president’s name with a criminal act.
Paranoia aside, there is a lesson to be learned: An enticing headline can be misleading. Only if we read from a variety of sources and read the whole story will we begin to get a glimmer of the truth.
– Sharon Martin lives in Oilton, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
