How CNN, Fox Got Obamacare Wrong

It was the most anticipated Supreme Court decision in a decade. And somehow, for almost 10 agonizing minutes, some news outlets—CNN and Fox most prominent among them—could not decide what had happened. The Supreme Court’s own website crashed the day of the ruling, and decisions were not available online June 28 for half an hour after they were first released, making the American public entirely reliant on the credentialed press. Oops. After rapidly scanning paper copies of the court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, producers and reporters at two of America’s most-watched networks decided that a key part of the legislation, the individual mandate, had been struck down. In a surprisingly riveting tick-tock, SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein recounts nine minutes of misinformation.