President Obama’s signature health law has had a rough few months, with skyrocketing insurance rates, the collapse of nonprofit cooperatives and higher-than-expected taxpayer costs to extend Medicaid coverage.

You likely missed all of that if you rely on network news coverage for you information, however.

“The other two [network news shows] are missing all this issue. They’ve just completely ignored it the whole year.”

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According to a study this week by the Media Research Center, bad news about Obamacare received a grand total of just 2 minutes and 18 seconds on the three nightly news broadcasts from the beginning of the year through the end of August. And all of it occurred on the CBS Evening News.

“The other two are missing all this issue,” said Mike Ciandella, a research analyst at the Media Research Center. “They’ve just completely ignored it the whole year.”

What do viewers get instead? One story, Ciandella noted, was the sordid saga of Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte’s disputed robbery report in Brazil. That merited a combined 46 minutes and 49 seconds on the networks.

“There’s a lot of stories like that,” Ciandella said.

[lz_table title=”Obamacare Bad News Blackout” source=”Media Research Center”]Negative Obamacare Stories
ABC World News Tonight,zero seconds
CBS Evening News, 2 minutes and 8 seconds
NBC Nightly News,zero seconds
[/lz_table]

It is reasonable to suspect that there is more going on than the challenges covering what can be a difficult TV story, Ciandella said. Bad news about the Affordable Care Act likely just does not fit the narrative of many reporters, he said.

“Whenever there is nothing good to say, they just ignore it,” he said. “It’s classic bias by omission.”

Some major developments in Obamacare during 2016 include:

  • A report in February by the Government Accountability Office detailing that investigators had successfully defrauded the health system 11 out of 12 times. None of the network news operations covered it.
  • A report in March by the Congressional Budget Office concluding that the health law would cost $136 billion more than it had predicted a year before. The CBO also reported that 9 million fewer people will have work-based coverage than if the law had not been enacted. None of it made the nightly news.
  • Reports in April and May that a million fewer people had coverage during 2016 than had been projected, and that a dozen co-ops would not offer insurance next year. UnitedHealthcare also announced that it would dramatically scale back its participation in health exchanges set up by the law. The CBS Evening News was the only network show to give any of that airtime, and then only for 23 seconds on April 19.
  • Revelations, also in April, that insurance premiums would rise by as much as 76 percent in some states. The news programs maintained their Obamacare blackout.
  • An order by a federal judge on May 12 that President Obama illegally used federal funds to pay premium subsidies for lower-income customers on the health exchanges. Again, no coverage.
  • An announcement in August by Aetna that it would abandon the health exchanges after losing $300 million this year from individual plans. Humana also said it was pulling the plug on Obamacare. This merited coverage from CBS only, for a total of 1 minute and 53 seconds.
  • Reports that UnitedHealth Group, Health Care Services Corp., Highmark, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield all posted losses in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But the network news divisions skipped it.