What exactly have the DEM been doing (outside of whining about closed door meetings) to help defeat/fight the Senate GOP health care plan? Someone was asleep at the wheel – PB/TK
How the Democrats blew the health-care fight – By Jeff Spross / June 26 2017
There are many remarkable things about the Senate’s version of TrumpCare, which finally went public last Thursday. Chief among them is how the bill was written up: in almost total secrecy, amidst an almost total lack of news coverage.
“It was omitted from all the places most Americans get their news — television, print, and online front pages — until the past few days,” lamented Brian Beutler of The New Republic. Activists and a few brave media souls spent several weeks in May and June trying to turn the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) into the kind of news story it deserved to be, all to little avail. It will now be voted on this week with almost no serious debate, in the halls of Congress or in the nation at large.
Beutler chalked this up to a massive institutional failure of the media. And that’s fair to an extent. But far more important, I think, was the failure of the Democratic Party to simply make it a big deal.
It all begins with the “news hook.” In the parlance of journalism, that’s basically your excuse for writing a story. It’s the unusual, the dramatic, or simply the latest event that feeds into a pre-existing narrative. It features prominently in headlines and the first few sentences of articles. It’s what entices the reader into the rest of a piece by showing them something new that matters now.
Continue to theweek.com article: http://theweek.com/articles/707884/how-democrats-blew-healthcare-fight
