I spent most of Thursday scanning the Internet to see how the Supreme Court decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act would affect the St. Louis Cardinals.
At the end of the day I was still unsure, but I’m sure it will affect the Cardinals because, according to what I read, the court’s discussion was the biggest ruling since the landmark decision in Burger v. The Rest of the Fifth-Grade Class at Millard Fillmore Elementary School. In that case, you will recall, the Supreme Court ruled against Burger when it said it was illegal for a person during a game of freeze tag to call “timeout” when someone else was in the act of tagging said person.
According to what I read Thursday, the Supreme Court’s decision was either:
No: 1: The best news in the history of news.
Or:
No. B: The end of the world as we know it.
I’m not really sure what the court’s decision means, but I’m fairly confident that no matter what happens with health care, our Congress creatures will figure out a way to screw it up. And when it comes to reporting on what our Congress does with health care, I’m also confident that the morons who run cable TV news channels will screw that up as well.
Seriously, does anyone watch cable TV news channels for important information anymore?
On our cable system at home, there are four or five 24-hour news channels, and whenever I zip through channels during commercials in sporting events, I make it a point to zip on past the news channels.
I was reminded why I dislike cable news channels when I read about CNN and Fox News screwing up their initial coverage Thursday of the Supreme Court ruling. In their early coverage, both of the networks somehow managed to get the story pretty much entirely wrong.
Both CNN and Fox News initially reported that the court had struck down the Affordable Care Act, which as we all know was pretty much the opposite of what the court did. As mistakes go, what the cable channels did was of “Dewey Defeats Truman” proportions. The only difference is that when the Chicago Tribune made its infamous mistake, it was big news because back then, mistakes like that were rare. Today, cable news channels spend most of their time getting things wrong.
Actually, of the two cable news TV channels, CNN screwed up the health care story worse than Fox News. CNN, on its website, not only ran a banner headline announcing that the Affordable Care Act had been overturned, but it also ran a lengthy store to that end.
At first, I figured that CNN had two stories prepared in advance of the ruling: one story if the health care law was overturned, and one if it was not. I figured that somebody accidentally put up the wrong story. That would have been a stupid but understandable mistake. But that’s not what happened. According to CNN’s own apology, what happened is that the network’s “experts” didn’t read the entire ruling.
First CNN Expert: Golly, these court stories wouldn’t be so hard if the judges didn’t use so many words.
Second CNN Expert: I know, right? It’s like they’re a bunch of lawyers or something.
All of that, and I still don’t know how the ruling will affect the Cardinals. I guess I’ll have to check ESPN.
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