Local and national news organizations get Obamacare ruling wrong

Like everyone, the media makes mistakes, which is not to excuse factual errors in reporting but merely to acknowledge that they happen. That said, how do you explain the colossal blunder that accompanied today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Obama administration’s health care law? The Times-Picayune‘s nola.com website ran a headline for at least 10 minutes that the central tenet in the law—the individual mandate provision—had been struck down by the high court, even though the headline over the story’s text reflected correctly that the law was upheld. The New Orleans news organization may have been taking its cues from CNN and Fox, both of which also incorrectly reported that the law had been struck down. The mistake appears to have stemmed from the structure of the decision, which says the individual mandate is not constitutional under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution before saying it is constitutional as a tax, according to a Washington Post blog. Apparently by first having read Chief Justice Roberts’ rejection—in his 59-page opinion—of the Commerce Clause argument advanced by the Obama administration, the news organizations assumed the individual mandate had been struck down, not realizing that later parts of the opinion would uphold it. “It’s obviously a very complicated decision, and the story will be told over hours and days and not in the first 30 minutes,” notes Bob Ritter, a professional in residence at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication. “I’m chagrined to see that in its rush to be first so many organizations got it wrong.”