The Obama administration’s just-before-July 4 surprise—postponing for a year the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate—generated a ton of news coverage, from perfunctory to nuts-and-bolts only, to the more analytical and sometimes speculative. Some of the reporting, though, was quite good, and discussed the business aspects of Obamacare the press should have been on top of all along.

For months, the business community had been complaining about this or that provision of the health reform law and the onerous requirements they said it imposed. Complaints ranged from taxes they must pay to subsidize insurance for the uninsured to too much record keeping, which they said would eventually mean worker layoffs. The media made light last fall of Papa John’s, aka John Schnatter’s, announcement that his pizza chain would have to cut employee hours and jack up the price of pizzas because of Obamacare. There was much more to that story, as last week’s announcement shows. Among the news outlets that churned out coverage of the delay last week, there was a clear standout that dug into the behind-the-scenes story and more: Politico, which deserves a CJR laurel.

Late in the day on July 2, with the long holiday weekend looming, the Treasury Department revealed in a blog post that it was postponing until 2015 the requirement that businesses with 50 or more workers must provide health insurance or face penalties. Between July 2 and 4, jumping off this news, Politico’s team produced seven pieces which pretty much gave readers everything they needed to know about the employer mandate, but likely didn’t know before the July 2 delay. (Granted, Politico— along with Politico Pro—has a lot of health policy knowledge and peoplepower). Hours after the announcement, Politico reporters got up two quick-react stories: a short post quoting White House adviser Valerie Jarrett who said “we are listening” to business; and, a straightforward “6 Questions about the Obamacare mandate”.

Another fast-react piece featured comments from GOP pols like Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso who called the delay a “cynical political ploy to delay the coming train wreck associated with Obamacare until after the 2014 elections.” Politico Pro also wrote about the (predictable) reaction from business groups delighted with the delay but warning that more provisions may need fixing. “We don’t want to forget there are significant changes needed in the law, so long term we are still going to pursue those,” said Judith Thorman, a lobbyist for the International Franchise Association.

The real standout in Politico’s coverage was a trio of pieces that got beyond the obvious headlines and revealed how the business community worked cooperatively, strategically, and with meticulous planning to push for the postponement. Their campaign left hardly a doubt about what Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom once called the privileged position of American business and its lobbying clout. You got that message quickly in the lede of a revealing July 4 piece by Joanne Kenen and Paige Winfield Cunningham which told how Ron Pollack—the head of the advocacy group Families USA, and, per Politico, “one of the White House’s closest allies on Obamacare” as well as the media’s go-to guy when they wanted a consumer quote—did not even get a heads up from the administration about the delay. Kenen and Cunningham noted that “some of the business lobbyists who had urged the administration to push back its rules” were likewise unprepared for the announcement last Tuesday. But the vice president of one business group told Politico that “we certainly felt like we were making headway” in what Politico described as a “coordinated campaign to convince senior White House officials that their date for requiring coverage was simply impractical.”

Trudy Lieberman is a fellow at the Center for Advancing Health and a longtime contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. She is the lead writer for The Second Opinion, CJR’s healthcare desk, which is part of our United States Project on the coverage of politics and policy. Follow her on Twitter @Trudy_Lieberman.