For a while (Tuesday) morning, the Internet was hopping with job-killing hype, when in fact the truth was vastly different. Obamacare’s impact, the CBO concluded, would lessen the supply of labor by encouraging certain folks not to work: “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked. . . .”

For someone approaching retirement, notes Kessler, Obamacare could well mean that they needn’t hold onto a bad job just to keep health insurance. That’s a far different dynamic from job-killing.

To illustrate just how the media had handled the CBO study, Kessler’s post included a number of headlines harvested from the Internet this morning, amid a backlash highlighting the finer points of the CBO report. In some cases, headline changes ensued; in others, news outlets stuck to their original phrasing. Below, we chronicle some of the action....

This is a debacle. I came into this story pretty cold, reading about the CBO report and then clicking on a link to read it. At the time, I hadn't read any news accounts, so I just scrolled down to the chapter on Obamacare and spent about ten minutes browsing through it. And here's the thing: the CBO's conclusions were crystal clear. The report explained in simple language what effect Obamacare was likely to have and what channels it worked through. It even had a handy bullet list showing the most important causes of lower employment.

And yet, lots of reporters and headline writers got it wrong. It's crazy. This is policy 101, not some deeply technical report that you need a data sherpa to understand. Obamacare doesn't kill jobs. It makes people more secure and thus less likely to keep a job they don't want or work more hours than they need to. It also, like all means-tested programs, provides a modest disincentive for poor people to work more hours, since extra income will be accompanied by lower subsidies.

At least one Republican is setting the record straight on what the Congressional Budget Office actually said this week about Obamacare and its effect on jobs.

House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) explained in a Wednesday hearing with CBO director Steven Elmendorf that the health care reform law wouldn't cost the U.S. economy more than 2 million jobs, as many of his colleagues alleged, but that Americans would choose to work less.

"I want to make sure we accurately understand what it is you are saying," Ryan said, before leading Elmendorf through a series of questions to explain the report and its findings.

Ryan and Elmendorf combined to explain that Obamacare would lead to a decrease in the number of hours worked by up to 2 percent in 2024. Most of that drop, the CBO said, would be the result of Americans choosing not to work, for various reasons, but not because employers would want to hire fewer workers on account of the law. Translate those lost hours into full-time employment and it equals up to 2.5 million jobs by 2024. But that's not the same as jobs being cut.

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal. Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States. But even those areas of the media that the "big six" do not completely control are becoming increasingly concentrated. For example, Clear Channel now owns over 1000 radio stations across the United States. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are increasingly dominating the Internet.

But it is the "big six" that are the biggest concerns. When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think. They don't call it "programming" for nothing.