NPR Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving takes a look at why President Obama’s prime-time news conference last week failed to give momentum to the health care reform effort.
He identifies three key problems that seem to have stalled the efforts, including people’s frustration that Obama has not provided enough detail about a new system – the public wants to know “How will the changes affect me?”
But, Elving points out:
In the end, the fine detail of any new program is never entirely clear until the program is place. … The political system produces a new direction, policymakers put it into law. Then a world of players, both in and out of government, co-create the new reality.
In the meantime, Michael Calderone of Politico reports that health care has been bad for television ratings.
More than 24 million viewers tuned in for last week’s press conference but that was “the smallest prime-time audience of Obama’s presidency, dropping 50 percent from five months ago.”
John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and a political writer for The New York Times, expressed some of the frustration of reporting on health care reform, saying “It’s not only not a cable TV-friendly story; it’s not a journalism-friendly story.”
He says that reporters must “first understand the intricacies and nuances of health care policy before they can then try getting the story across to viewers and readers. Last week, Harwood said, he was ‘trying to get [his] head around the issue of cost control’ before penning a Times column.
“’It’s incredibly complex to try and explain to people,’ Harwood said.”
NPR’s Julie Rovner agrees, saying the issue is “so big and so complicated that the public is never really going to understand all the moving parts of this.
