Day 165: Local Press in Red States Crushes Senate’s Health Care Bill

Senators throughout the South woke up to scathing stories.

Donald Trump’s words and actions are outrageous. Shockingly hot take, right? People know Trump. They react to Trump. They like him. They hate him. But beyond Trump, most Americans are in the dark about who makes the decisions affect them and how. Study after study shows Americans have a pretty poor grasp on everything from how their government works to who their own senators are to even what party is in power.

In response to that, the national media tends to cover large stories in broad strokes, such as terrorism or catastrophes. They’ll cover health care reform too, but getting into specifics is often trickier than just covering Trump’s tweets. For one, laws tend to be a lot more nuanced than “Trump is ranting about fake news again.”

It’s hard for the CNNs of the world to tell their viewers exactly how they will be affected by the health care bill. For instance, the impact on each state has a number of different factors to consider, such as whether a governor has accepted Medicaid expansion or the number of individuals projected to lose private insurance. National news organizations are also driven to keep eyeballs from everywhere, and it’s tough for those in Nevada to watch in earnest as a cable news show discusses what will happen to Arkansans if the health care bill becomes law.

Local media filled in the obvious gap this weekend.

With Congress currently in recess, a number of senators — many in deep red states — woke up to home-state headlines explaining how bad the Senate’s health care bill would be for their constituents.

Dan Diamond, a writer for Politico, aggregated many of these headlines.

The Post and Courier — South Carolina’s biggest paper — got in on the act too.

In case you lost track, that’s leading newspapers from not-quite-so-liberal America: Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, West Virginia, Alaska, Kentucky and South Carolina.

This is why a strong local press is so important. They can reach out to their readers and explain what it means to them, as opposed to America as a whole. The former makes it real; the latter is so broad that it’s easy to retreat into “well I’ll be fine” mode.

165 days in, 1297 to go

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