In the race to be first with the news that the Supreme Court had upheld a key provision of President Barack Obama’s health-care plan, Bloomberg News beat out rival wire services for the gold medal.
Bloomberg clocked in at 10:07.31 a.m. yesterday with the headline, “Obama’s health-care upheld by US Supreme Court.” Reuters followed right behind at 10:07:43, delivering, “Supreme Court Upholds Health-Care Mandate.”
AP scored bronze at 10:07:56, flashing “Supreme Court Upholds Obama Law’s requirement.” Pulling up the rear was Dow Jones at 10:08:22, with “Supreme Court: Insurance Mandate is Constitutional as a Tax.”
While the wire services got it right, the same can’t be said for their broadcast counterparts.
CNN, reporting a full minute later, went with the news that the key mandate requiring individuals to carry insurance had been overturned and put out tweets and e-mail alerts to that effect.
BuzzFeed.com’s Michael Hastings traced the screwup to a CNN producer inside the court, Bill Mears, who relayed the news to 29-year-old correspondent Kate Bolduan on the outside, who said on air, “It appears as if the Supreme Court just struck down the individual mandate, the centerpiece of the law.”
CNN’s publicity machine compounded the error by blasting out e-mail alerts that were widely picked up and bringing on some of its legal analysts, including The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, to talk about the decision based on the erroneous information.
BuzzFeed said that CNN newsroom insiders were infuriated by the screwup.
“We had a chance to cover it right. And some people in here don’t get what a big deal getting it wrong is. Morons,” BuzzFeed quoted one CNN source.
In a statement, CNN apologized and also tried to explain the screwup: “In his opinion, Chief Justice [Paul] Roberts initially said that the individual mandate was not a valid exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause. CNN reported that fact, but then wrongly reported that therefore the court struck down the mandate as unconstitutional. However, that was not the whole of the court’s ruling.
“CNN regrets that it didn’t wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate. We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.”
Fox News also went with the wrong interpretation. “We have breaking news here on the Fox News Channel,” Bill Hemmer said at 10:07:43. “The individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional.”
By 10:09:03, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was backtracking, saying, “Wait, we are getting conflicting information.”
Fox News executive Michael Clemente said in a statement, “We gave our viewers the news as it happened. When Justice Roberts said and we read, that the mandate was not valid under the Commerce clause, we reported it. Bill Hemmer even added, ‘be patient as we work through this.’ Then when we heard and read that the mandate could be upheld under the government’s power to tax, we reported that as well — all within two minutes.”
By comparison, CNN took a full six minutes to correct its misinformation. (News Corp. owns Fox and The Post.)
Meanwhile, some of the wire services that had gotten it correct were gloating.
That prompted AP News Editor David T. Scott to tell staffers to knock it off.
“Please immediately, stop taunting on social networks about CNN and others’ SCOTUS ruling mistake and the AP getting it right. That’s not the impression we want to reflect as an organization. Let our reporting take the lead,” Scott said.
On Time
Time will hammer out a special issue on health care even though its regular weekly issue, featuring Egypt on the cover, hits today.
The health-care issue hits Monday. Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel, said that the press run would be increased modestly and it would stay on sale for 10 days. The cover features the headline, “Roberts Rules: What His Landmark Decision Means for Obama, Romney, the Court and You.”
Newsweek is dark this week as it put out a July 4 double issue last week, but it has been covering the court’s ruling on the Daily Beast website.
Aguiar in
Modern Luxury is wasting no time in staffing up following the appointment of Cristina Greeven Cuomo as the new editor- in-chief of Manhattan.
James Aguiar, a former fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman and the former host of the cable TV show “Full Frontal Fashion,” is coming on board as the fashion director for all the magazines owned by Dickey Publishing’s Modern Luxury, which has 40 titles in 12 cities.
He told Media Ink he will be directing all aspects of the fashion coverage in the magazines, from editing to photography and will be working out of the New York offices.