A reader writes:
How many times have you gotten something wrong on your blog, then defended yourself by saying that everybody makes mistakes but you're doing the best you can while essentially reacting live in front of an audience? There's a whole lot of real, substantive news today, and none of it involves CNN getting its coverage wrong for a few minutes. It was a complicated decision, they misread it at first, and they corrected it when they could. But this sort of knee-jerk impulse to make the media's coverage into the story itself simply keeps the media circus spinning. They made a mistake; can't we just acknowledge it and move on without using it to declare the "the end of cable news"? The CNN and FOX headlines make for amusing screenshots, but that's about it. Of the many, many, many faults with cable news, jumping the gun by a couple minutes on this decision has got to be way down at the bottom of the list.
I think a news organization has one core responsibility: to report the news accurately. They failed, while blogosphere amateurs didn't. We published a defense of CNN earlier today, and, yes, everyone makes mistakes. But court reporters really should know better than listening to the first few minutes of a long ruling and rushing to camera. As to the reader's deeper point, yes, sure. Compared with broadcasting Piers Morgan every night, everything else pales.
The Dish 