Reporter's ObamaCare Tweet Goes Awry

The ObamaCare website needs all the good news it can get, which might explain why the White House was thrilled to see this tweet last week from New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza: "Huh, I just tested http://healthcare.gov for the first time and I was able to set up an account with no trouble." Jay Carney and another senior official retweeted the apparent success story, and the account took off. One problem, as ProPublica points out: Lizza ran into trouble within 40 minutes of sending out that tweet, and his enrollment soon got hung up in computer delays. But his subsequent tweets about the snags didn't get the same treatment as the first.

"It was the Twitter equivalent of blurbing a book using the one positive line from a review that actually trashed the book," Lizza tells Charles Ornstein of ProPublica (who had a similar experience). It's "an instructive lesson in the speed of the news cycle and how incorrect information takes on a life of its own," writes Ornstein. Click for the full story, which includes all of Lizza's tweets that day. (More ObamaCare stories.)