Christine de la Huerta|Jun 28, 2012

It’s the morning of Thursday June 28, 2012, and Americans are anxiously anticipating the widely publicized U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Obama’s most important policy to date, the health care law.

At 10:10 a.m., my first breaking news alert comes in from CNN:

That’s a big aspect of the law. Major blow to the administration. Major impact to the presidential campaign. And CNN is the authority, right?

At 10:19, another alert pops up. It’s a correction:

OK, that’s a pretty major difference. Now it’s a major win for the administration. Completely different set of issues arise.

I know nine minutes is not a long time to the average person, but perhaps it’s too long to wait in our instantaneous, 24-hour news cycle.

In their rush to be first with the “news,” it almost appears as if an outlet such as CNN is predicting outcomes and sending news alerts before the news is ready to be reported. Otherwise, how could they be so off? It begs the question: What’s more important: to be first or to be right?

Personally, I would rather wait five more minutes and have the correct information delivered to my inbox. Being the first means nothing if I lose trust in a news organization’s ability to deliver accurate reporting.

For days, all the pundits have been speculating and posing conjecture about the outcome of this decision. In my opinion, they should save themselves the trouble and actually get the story right when in fact there is a news story to report.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

 

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