The big story blows through
News Headline: “Obama’s Supreme Court health-care victory hard to overstate.”
But rest assured, we in the news media are working on it. (QT)
The Supreme Court decision upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the biggest business story of the year, and not just because of the limitations it imposed on the Constitution’s “commerce clause.” Perhaps this week the media will wake up to that fact and start telling us more about it.
The Supreme Court announced its ruling at midmorning Thursday. As I advise everyone to do on days when big news is scheduled, I slept in until 2 p.m., and then caught up after the dust had settled.*
What had I missed? The first thing I saw told me what had happened only backasswardly. The shocking development was that CNN and Fox News had initially misreported the court’s decision. And, the important results were in: “Bloomberg said that it broke the news 12 seconds before Reuters and 25 seconds before The Associated Press.” All that while I was slumbering. (This obsession with cable news is especially silly when you acknowledge that essentially no one watches it. Granted, the cable-news audience spikes when “big news” breaks, but it’s still a good bet that more people in the Washington area were watching “Let’s Make a Deal” than CNN Thursday morning, or were annoyed by bulletins that interrupted it. Take away the viewers in Washington newsrooms and government offices, and the gap would have been much wider.)
“Stocks dip, then recover on Supreme Court’s health-care decision.” There was the mandatory “stock-market reaction” story, which, as is the case will all such stories, drew an unsupportable conclusion from irrelevant data. (Remember: Don’t assume that a single event, or even a series of events, caused the market to go up or down. There’s a lot going on in the world.)
The Washington Post reported: “Major health insurance stocks plummeted right after the ruling but have been edging upwards over the morning. That might reflect the market girding for the individual mandate being overturned ….” If that was the case, why would have the stocks “plummeted” after the ruling was announced, unless buyers had been watching CNN or Fox News?
Politico reported: “Companies that focus on policies for private companies dipped down, while those that do business with Medicaid were up.” Politico referenced Molina Healthcare, which does a lot of Medicaid business, whose share price rose 8 percent. “Centene Corp., another Medicaid-centered provider, was up more than 2 percent.” But the next day, Centene shares fell 1.4 percent. Why did Molina go up 6 percentage points more than Centene on Thursday? Why did Centene fall on Friday while Molina rose 1.3 percent more? These are questions that the editor should have asked. Who knows? No one, really. Trying to figure it out is a losing game and a waste of time.
Meanwhile, how many people got to read about Paraguay on Friday morning? Sorry, no space.
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* This works especially well for elections, as I discovered in 2004, when for some reason my services were no longer required on election night. Sleeping late did not work so well on Sept. 11, 2001, but what happened that day wasn’t on my calendar.