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Two Key Details in SCOTUSblog's Play-by-Play of ObamaCare Ruling

This article is more than 10 years old.

Where were you at 10:06 a.m. on Thursday, June 28? If you had any interest in politics or health care--heck, if you've somehow found your way to reading this post--you were probably parked on SCOTUSblog.

Because the Supreme Court refuses to allow cameras in the courtroom and delays posting its rulings to the Web, SCOTUSblog has become the Court's de facto amanuensis: a trusted site for immediate summaries of decisions and quick-hitting analysis.

And on June 28, more than a million readers around the world--including White House staff and the plaintiffs' lawyers--waited on the blog to offer an update on the Affordable Care Act ruling.

Nine days after the law was upheld, SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein has released a terrifically reported, minute-by-minute analysis of that frenetic morning. The 7,000-word story--a classic journalistic "tick-tock"--offers new revelations about how CNN and Fox News ran with the wrong story and how SCOTUSblog make sure to get it right.

It's another reminder that SCOTUSblog has emerged as a force in legal journalism, even if the Court has failed to rightfully acknowledge it. (More on that point in a bit.)

Goldstein doesn't name names, but his analysis is still full of juicy details that include:

  • An inside look at how CNN and Fox News set themselves up to fail, in a dangerous rush-to-report and via social media that reinforced their early errors.
  • How anchor Megyn Kelly's own reading of SCOTUSblog helped Fox News quickly correct the record, while CNN continued to ignore wire reports for minutes.
  • Contrary to previous reports, President Obama went more than five minutes thinking that his signature law had been overturned, thanks to Fox News and CNN.

It's a gripping read for anyone who followed the ObamaCare ruling, and Poynter and Politico have already excerpted key anecdotes.

But there are two face-palm details that are getting mostly overlooked.

The Supreme Court's website crashed for 30 crucial minutes

Per usual procedure, reporters who were physically at the Court were able to get printed copies of the ruling. But when SupremeCourt.gov buckled under unprecedented demand--with millions of people desperately reloading the page--the Court's staff couldn't publish their own site for a half-hour. They hadn't planned to email out the opinion, either.

So until 10:30 a.m., "everyone in the country not personally at 1 First St., NE in Washington, DC, [was] completely dependent on the press to get the decision right," Goldstein writes on SCOTUSblog.

And because the press didn't get it right--with erroneous headlines that ObamaCare's mandate had been struck down, prompting a wave of self-reinforcing emails, tweets, and other reports--the so-called "fog of law" helped mislead everyone from Wall Street to Main Street, until the official opinion was finally posted.

SupremeCourt.gov's failure was somewhat predictable. As O'Reilly Media's Alex Howard and I discussed before the ruling, the site clearly wasn't optimized for the Web demands of 2012.

But that doesn't mean the failure is forgivable. Looking at SCOTUSblog's post-mortem, Howard suggests that the Court faces the "follow-up questions that should be posed to any organization's Web operations team: if your site buckles during a critical time under high demand, how will you avoid the issue in the future?"

Howard's not being rhetorical. Writing on Facebook, he offers the Court some simple solutions:

If there's a high demand PDF, mirror it. (Put it onto Amazon, Google or Facebook: they're good at scaling to hundreds of millions.) Or put the public page of SCOTUS into a more scalable environment than whatever host they have it on now. Or start releasing the opinions through an API, so that media organizations of all kinds can hit it once and then publish it on their sites.

I'd add that the Court should revisit its traditional approach to transparency. We assume that the Justices have to be opaque; that it's in their nature to shun media coverage. But there's nothing that forces SupremeCourt.gov to have a website straight out of the 1990s. And foreign high courts offer everything from live webcasts to Twitter feeds, in hopes of improving communication--and avoiding disasters.

SCOTUSblog does not have a press credential to cover the Court.

Many hundreds of organizations have Supreme Court press credentials, Goldstein points out. But SCOTUSblog isn't one of them.

In fact, the blog's famed reporter Lyle Denniston only has a credential because he also files reports for Boston-based radio station WBUR.

SCOTUSblog taking the time to get the health care ruling right. (Photo credit: justgrimes)

Under current procedure, getting credentialed for the Court means getting credentialed by the Senate Gallery, which won't approve SCOTUSblog, Goldstein says. And while SCOTUSblog has "requested an exception from SCOTUS, [we]were refused," he adds.

Denniston's WBUR credential ensured that SCOTUSblog received immediate access to the ObamaCare ruling. But to have the most prominent Supreme Court-focused news site rely on one reporter's connection to a Massachusetts public radio station...well, it seems a little dicey.

Goldstein agrees. "If we were ever to find ourselves without a credentialed reporter, then we would sue, if the Court was still unwilling to change its position," he told me.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that. If recent press leaks are to be believed, Chief Justice Roberts actively reads media coverage of the Court. And if SCOTUSblog has proved anything in recent weeks, it's that a spare-and-balanced approach is a winning, necessary strategy for all of us seeking details about SCOTUS.

So here's an appeal to members of the media: Let's make sure SCOTUSblog doesn't just get deserved credit -- but the credentials it deserves, too.