Journalism's slide into health-debate weariness

[Commentary] It was the story that refused to die. Sunday's last-gasp passage of President Obama's health care bill will finally liberate the journalists who have been chained to this complicated, arcane, often tedious story for 14 long months.

It's not that media types were rooting for the House to drag the measure across the finish line. It's that many were frustrated by a tangled tale that never seemed to end, and knew that plenty of readers and viewers were sick of the subject as well. The conventional wisdom is that the press failed to educate the public about the bill's sweeping changes, leaving much of America confused about just what it contained. That is largely a bum rap, for the media churned out endless reams of data and analysis that were available to anyone who bothered to look. As time went on, though, journalists became consumed by political process and Beltway politics, to the point that the substance of health care reform was overwhelmed. Here the plea is guilty-with-an-explanation: The battle came down to whether the Senate could adopt changes by majority vote (reconciliation) and, until late Saturday, whether the House could approve the Senate measure without a recorded vote (deem and pass). With the bill's fate hanging by these procedural threads, there was no way to avoid making that the overriding story. (And yes, the Senate reconciliation vote is still to come.)