CNN’s Howard Kurtz Take On CNN’s SCOTUS Flub: ‘It Wasn’t Pretty’
On CNN’s Reliable Sources today, Howard Kurtz didn’t shy away from the journalistic equivalent of a brainfart that unfolded for a glorious seven minutes on the network last week. Kurtz said “it wasn’t pretty” and spent a whole segment piling on the network (and Fox News, which also got the scoop wrong) for being so quick to break the story instead of just waiting two minutes to verify the information.
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Kurtz started out by acknowledging the very complexity of a Supreme Court decision and how language used might throw off the casual observer, so it’s at least somewhat understandable how this whole mess happened. Kurtz ran a pretty succinct montage of the gut-wrenching seven minutes where CNN was erroneously reporting that the Supreme Court struck down the individual mandate, though he made sure to point out that Fox News was guilty of screwing up as well (albeit for less time than CNN did).
Kurtz just came right out and asked his guests how big a “blunder” this was for the network. Journalism professor Mark Feldstein said the cable news format in general does not leave much room for depth, but admitted “there’s no way to spin” how badly CNN screwed up. Kurtz was completely bewildered at how unbelievably avoidable the whole mess was.
“What drives me crazy… is that if these cable news channels had waited an extra two or three minutes for their producers or correspondents to keep reading the opinion to see the part where… Chief Justice Roberts actually upheld as a tax the individual health care mandate, then they would have been right, but they don’t seem to have the patience to do that.”
Michael Medved said there was a lack of “proper preparation” for the ruling, and by making the build-up so “dramatic” and “confrontational,” the media basically brought this on themselves. Margaret Carlson said the fiasco was a “stain on CNN” and actually thought “over-preparation” was to blame for the confusion. The reporter who broke the news live on CNN heard from her producer that the mandate was struck down under the Commerce Clause, and very few people would have assumed it somehow got upheld another way.
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Kurtz noted that in contrast to how quickly CNN asserted responsibility for the mistake, Fox News’ explanation was not really so much a mea culpa as it was a pithy excuse. Feldstein said it was “really troubling” that Fox has not been addressing its screw-up in the same way that CNN has.
Watch the video below, courtesy of CNN:
