Abstract
This article analyzes the political effects of American media coverage on Tea Party health care politics. It suggests that the American media’s inability to critique the neoliberal assumptions that lay at the foundation of Tea Party ideology have served—however inadvertently—to excite ideological confusion in American health care debates, especially those surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Specifically, this article shows that media failure to make sense of the ideological and statistical basis of Tea Party opposition to the ACA, as well as a general unwillingness to mediate disagreement, have barred mainstream media from helping Americans see that the ACA is largely consistent with neoliberal orthodoxy, and certainly far from “socialist.” As a result, the media has served to legitimate rather than critique positions that stand at the center of Tea Party ideology.
