CNN's own legal analyst described Wednesday morning's Supreme Court
hearing on ObamaCare as a "trainwreck" for the Obama administration and
added "it may also be a plane wreck" – but prime-time hosts Anderson
Cooper and Piers Morgan made only one brief mention between them of the
bill's rough morning in court, during Wednesday night's prime-time
coverage.
In fact, during Tuesday and Wednesday night's newscasts, Morgan and Cooper made only two brief mentions of the hearings -- while the rest of CNN's afternoon coverage on those days heavily discussed the Court's hearings on ObamaCare.
On Wednesday, CNN covered the Court's examination of the health care bill every hour from noon until 8 p.m. EDT. However, the next three hours of Anderson Cooper 360 and Piers Morgan Tonight made no mention of the hearings save one – and that framed the demise of the ObamaCare mandate as something that could hurt Republicans.
"Well the feeling of a lot of legal analysts seems to be that the Court
is likely to toss out the individual mandate portion of health care
reform," Cooper told Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), and then asked "if that
were to happen, could it actually end up working against Republicans,
giving them one less thing to run on in the fall?"
The Vice President of the United States believed that the health care
bill's passage was a "big f***ing deal," but after the bill's central
provision – the individual mandate – had two bad days in court,
apparently Cooper and Morgan didn't think that was much of a deal at
all.
On both Tuesday and Wednesday, CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin made headlines for his description of the mandate's plight in the Supreme Court -- a "trainwreck" for the Obama administration. Toobin often appeared on CNN to expound upon his dire analysis. However, he was not a guest on Anderson Cooper 360 or Piers Morgan Tonight.
In fact, on Tuesday night's Anderson Cooper 360, Cooper hosted President Obama's deputy campaign manager but did not ask her about the health care bill's predicament at the Supreme Court.
Piers Morgan's one mention of the hearings came on Tuesday night, when he asked Florida attorney general Pam Bondi -- the state's official lead plaintiff in its case against ObamaCare -- where she felt the case was going "from a legal perspective."