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Democrats hit media for ACA CBO coverage

Another day, another media fight over Obamacare.

On Tuesday when the CBO released its 181-page report on the Affordable Care Act, the one statistic that got the most headline attention was this: “The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.”

The headlines and attack ads seem to write themselves. Here was a bona fide, nonpartisan government organization saying the Affordable Care Act will mean 2.5 million fewer full-time workers by 2024. And indeed many headlines zeroed in on “jobs lost” or how Obamacare will “cost 2.5 million workers," as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple pointed out.

But as our colleagues David Nather and Jason Millman note, “there’s a lot more fine print about what those numbers really mean, and whether the jobs were ‘lost.’ In fact, CBO said it’s in large part about the number of hours people choose to work, not actual job losses. But what matters politically is how the numbers look in attack ads. And in this election year, ‘2 million lost jobs’ is a Republican ad-maker’s dream.”

Several news organizations made changes to their reports and headlines. Some, including the Post, issued corrections. Others, including POLITICO, updated their stories and headlines to focus on the political debate over the report. (In a statement, POLITICO Health Care Editor Joanne Kenen said the headline was adjusted as the team did more reporting: "As is often the case, we write a breaking news story, and as we do more reporting throughout the day, we update the story, and we update the headline," she said.)

Democrats were not happy about how the media reported the news. During a committee hearing on Wednesday with CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) ripped into the media “who shot across the headlines this idea that somehow the ACA was going to hurt jobs.”

“Now, I think it's really important that that information gets out there because as the media themselves confess, they bought hook, line and sinker some of the talking points from our Republican colleagues, and, unfortunately, misrepresentations go around the world three times before the truth begins to catch up but maybe it will begin to catch up at this point,” Van Hollen said.

At the daily press briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said he wanted to “commend the many news organizations that in a very forthright issued corrections to initial headlines that misrepresented on a factual basis what the CBO reported. Those headlines continue to be spouted by Republicans and some networks as fact but they’re just false.”

The pushback from Democrats definitely has merit, though the Post’s Chris Cillizza notes that their explanation will likely be too complicated for the political ads that will likely blanket the airwaves.

“If every negative ad was required to provide the full context of every attack contained therein, 30-second ads would have to be transformed into 30-minute infomercials,” Cillizza writes. "[P]eople, largely, believe what they want to believe. And that's even more true in a siloed media world where conservatives read, listen to and watch content that affirms their beliefs and liberals do the same.”