No, folks, this is not 1948.

Within moments after CNN announced with urgency and breathtaking inaccuracy that the Supreme Court had overturned “Obamacare” Thursday morning, Twitter was chattering about it under the hashtag #cnnfail.

Had this been 1948, the damage would have been relatively contained to the consumers of one product. It was the Chicago Tribune that inaccurately reported the defeat of President Truman. He made it famous by smiling and holding the paper aloft for photographers. Otherwise, only a few people who got that first edition would have known about it. The paper quickly followed up with a corrected edition.

Had this even been 1981, the damage would have been minimal. When John Hinckley Jr. fired shots at President Reagan, several media sources reported that White House Press Secretary James Brady was dead. The mistake has been debated in journalism schools and is generally known, but in 1981 there weren’t many alternative ways to get the news. The story was corrected and people moved on.

No, this is 2012. CNN didn’t just report the wrong outcome of the most important U.S. Supreme Court decision in years. It sent that wrong information out to smart-phones in the pockets of countless average Americans, ringing alerts that made them look. There was no way to miss this one.

And even though it corrected the error seven minutes later, it couldn’t stop the avalanche of social media chatter that, while mostly snarky, was filled with the kind of sage wisdom one expects to hear in the halls of journalism schools.

Among the snarky was this message to CNN reporters from Elizabeth Weitzman, telling them not to worry: “Even if you lose your job, you can still have health insurance.”

Among the sage was this from James Poniewozik: “Report it right but 2 minutes late, no one will care in an hour. Report it wrong 2 minutes early, no one will forget.”

Anyone who reads the first pages of the 192-page ruling can quickly see what happened. Right on the second page, it says Chief Justice John Roberts finds, “… that the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.”

That looks like a rejection of the individual mandate.

It isn’t until page 4 that you find Roberts saying, “the individual mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s power under the Taxing Clause.”

I have some sympathy for the reporters trying to quickly make sense of it all for CNN. You don’t have to work long in this business before making embarrassing mistakes. However, that doesn’t make them any less serious, or less damaging to your reputation.

The good news for CNN is that the public has a fairly short memory. I didn’t see a lot of Twitter talk recalling that NPR falsely reported in 2010 that Ariz. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been killed in the shooting that injured her in Tucson.

The bad news is that it will exist forever on the Internet. Today the news media is more competitive than ever before, and there is an urgency to be first. But the old-fashioned rules and virtues of good journalism also apply as never before.

As John Schwartz of the New York Times tweeted, “He who hesitates is smart.”

“Irretrievable depravity.”

Those two words popped up in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this week outlawing mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles convicted of murder.

Is a 14-year-old boy who goes along with his friends to rob a video store and ends up watching as one of them shoots and kills the clerk irretrievably depraved?

How about a different 14-year-old boy who, together with a friend, beats up a neighbor and sets fire to his trailer, leaving him to die of smoke inhalation?

Oh, did I mention this neighbor had been supplying drugs to the young man’s mother and that he had been giving the boy and his friend booze and marijuana on the day of the murder?

And does it matter to you that the boy’s mother had abused him so badly through the years that, according to an NPR report, he had tried to kill himself several times since he was 5 years old? Or how about the fact that his friend, who was 16, made a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony, and that he is serving a sentence that allows him to be paroled some day. The 14-year-old was charged as an adult with murder in the course of an arson, which in Alabama carries a mandatory, no-room-for-debate sentence of life in prison without parole.

This has been a week for momentous Supreme Court decisions. With health care and immigration leading the parade, few people noticed the entry on mandatory sentences for juveniles. It was no less important, however, in defining who we are as a nation.

A divided court ruled that mandatory life sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional. It did not, however, do anything to prevent a judge from issuing such a life sentence if he or she felt it appropriate, which is what judges are supposed to do, within guidelines set by the state.

I don’t know whether harsh minimum mandatory sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional. They certainly are now, as a matter of fact. The dissenting justices, however, made some strong arguments about the original intent of the Founders when they added the 8th Amendment to the Bill of Rights, making it illegal to inflict “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Justice Samuel Alito made a point of trying to distinguish the acts of someone who is 17 ½ from someone who is 6 months older and subject to adult laws. “Seventeen-year-olds commit a significant number of murders every year… . Many of these murderers are at least as mature as the average 18-year-old,” he wrote.

Good point, which is why my concerns aren’t so much for whether such laws are constitutional for juveniles or adults. I would simply persuade all state and federal lawmakers to do away with them for all.

That puts me in line with the American Bar Association, the Judicial Conference of the United States and just about every major organization focusing on criminal justice.

I couldn’t read the Supreme Court decision without thinking about the families I’ve met through the years whose children made horrible judgments. One of these children of a Utah family ended up being pardoned by President Clinton after serving several years in federal prison on drug charges. Had he been charged in a state court, the sentence likely would have been much less.

I also thought about Weldon Angelos, who sold drugs to a government informant and, because of circumstances, was given a mandatory sentence of 55 years. A U.S. district judge in Utah called it “unjust, cruel and even irrational,” but he had no choice.

Is someone who commits a certain crime “irretrievably depraved”? I don’t know. I doubt a group of state lawmakers from any of the 50 states knows, either. They won’t be considering any of the facts I asked you to consider. They simply decide whether to pass a law that casts a blanket sentence over any crime of a particular sort, and they often want to prove to voters how tough they are on crime.

A judge, however, can consider all the questions, and ought to be allowed to do so.

Much has been made in recent days of a new Gallup poll that shows the percentage of Americans who would not vote for a Mormon hasn’t moved since 1967, when pollsters asked the question in regard to Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney. The figure was 17 percent then; it’s 18 percent now — a statistical tie given the margin of error.

That part didn’t interest me so much. What I found fascinating was the question in the poll that asked Americans, “Do you happen to know the religious faith of Mitt Romney. (If yes) can you tell me what Mitt Romney’s religious faith is?”

Only 57 percent identified him as Mormon. Six percent thought he had no religion; 2 percent thought he was a Catholic; another 2 percent thought he was Protestant.

And 33 percent said they didn’t know.

Given all the chatter going on out there (I follow news stories about Romney and the “Mormon moment” every day), this tells me something important. A lot of Americans are simply disengaged from the political process.

They’re doing something else. Their minds are elsewhere. They may vote in November, but they won’t be thinking about that for a while.

And when they do, who knows if religion will be a factor?

As for the rest of the poll, Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times offers a good perspective. The anti-Mormon bias it reflected has as much to do with politics as anything.  Republicans seem to be rallying around Romney, regardless of his religion. Among Democrats, 24 percent say they’re not tolerant enough to do such a thing.

Most likely, that’s because Romney is the presumptive Republican candidate, and Harry Reid isn’t the Democratic candidate.

McManus writes, “The one worry for Romney, in a close election, lies in that tiny sliver of swing voters who are up for grabs.” Among them, 18 percent won’t vote for a Mormon, which could be a problem.

However, Gallup’s web site puts all this into some historical context.

“For example, a May 1960 Gallup poll found that 21 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate who was a Catholic, but Catholic John F. Kennedy went on to win the presidency that fall.”

Americans, it seems, may use more than one criterion when choosing a president.