Image via Andrew Phelps.

So it’s a little past 10 am, and reporters, bloggers, twitterers, and Don Verrilli are huddled around the SCOTUS liveblog or their TV or their various feeds. The decision is expected any second. C-Span blares in the background. Then, wait, we’re getting something here. CNN breaks the news:

Shit. Twitter erupts into panic, Obamacare is dead! The individual mandate has been struck down, CNN reports. The gory details:

Fox follows suit:

Too bad indeed. Shame that 32 million Americans will now be without the health care they elected Obama to deliver.

All of that happened in a matter of seconds. Wait, whoops:

Hat tip to Greg Boustead.

Obviously, it was all wrong—the Supreme Court actually upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, by a vote of 5-4. The individual mandate stands.

Because then there was this, from the far more inauspicious SCOTUS blog (which racked up an impressive 866,000 viewers):

And so it is that a boring chat room outfitted with all the technology of the original AOL instant messager did a vastly superior job of conveying the news than the nation’s highest-profile cable news organizations.

There’s no excuse for CNN, except that it’s obviously fiending for ratings and page views like a meth addict who’s been dry for a week. And this is the org that’s supposed to be “respectable,” remember, that bum-rushed the internet with info that was completely false in an effort to break the story thirteen seconds before everyone else. Has the internet really driven us to this? How many more page views could CNN possibly have racked up by being first? 300,000? Enough to justify giving a rats’ ass about fact-checking? Evidently.

Anywho, here’s the actual decision. See for yourself.