Breaking News!

I am sitting here watching the high court's ruling on the "Affordable Health Care Act" on CNN and it is a lesson in how to handle breaking news.  Immediately after 7am here in Phoenix, CNN reported that the most controversial aspect of the law, the individual mandate, was unconstitutional.  I took a screenshot, and here it is.

I immediately went to Twitter, and many people were posting the information as news.  For about 10 minutes, all I saw was something similar to this:  CNN reporting that individual mandate is unconstitutional.  

And then I saw this:

Which was quickly followed by this:

The CNN headline quickly went away, and changed to this:

 (I had to take a picture on of my TV.)

The company then began to backtrack, ACTUALLY TAKING THE TIME TO READ THE DECISION,  and then came out with this headline:

No matter what you might think of this decision, the lesson for us as journalists is to make sure you have all the information you need before you report anything.  Don't jump to conclusions, or report on partial information.  When we did the reporting exercise way back ago (Tuesday?  I don't remember what day it was, much less what day it is today), we had pieces of information, but could not see the full picture, so therefore only reported that there had been an explosion and two were dead.  We thought we had more information but could not get it verified.  So we didn't report it, even though in the end we were right.  

Make sure you know all the facts before you send out information that could be wrong.  Or you will look like this:

  Kelly Robinson