Appearing on the O'Reilly Factor Thursday, Time Magazine editor-at-large Mark Halperin acknowledged that there is "no doubt that a disservice was done to the country" by the media's failure to probe even superficially into Obamacare.

Laura, there is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program at the time of passage and during the context of the president’s re-election. Any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand.

But while Halperin, whose book Double Down chronicles the 2012 election cycle in great detail, admits that the press was completely MIA on the issue of Obamacare, he does not place the final blame with the press themselves. No, the true culprit, says Halperin, is - wait for it - Republicans generally and Mitt Romney specifically.

...the problem for the Republicans in the re-election context was you nominated, Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a guy who was not very well positioned, to say the least, to make the case against Obamacare because he passed the healthcare plan in Massachusetts. ...

Part of the flaws of the way the media works. If the candidates aren’t talking about it gets less coverage.

Of course, as the inestimable John Nolte at Breitbart points out:

Romney did hit on ObamaCare, once during the most high-profile of all presidential election events -- a presidential debate.  But he was immediately pummeled by elite media fact-checkers.

More recently, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and House Republicans pointed the enormous spotlight of a government shutdown on Obamacare, the media refused to look, instead going into to contortions to make Republicans villains, even calling them terrorists.

That's because the greater "flaws of the way media works" are that the media only work to service liberals. If it helps liberals, they cover it, and if it hurts liberals, they don't.

Double Down indeed.