It's another result of the news cycle tightening down. It used to be 24 hours, you would learning the news ever 24 hours when you got the paper or watched the evening news.

Then came the morning news and the news cycle shrank to a (lopsided) twelve hours.

Then came around-the-clock CNN, and the news cycle was shortened to 10 to 15 minutes.

Then with twitters and Facebook and so on, the news cycle is constant. Any given news story can be picked up and published instantly in hundreds of "respectable" outlets (and thousands not so respectable).

So when a news outlet gets a story they have to decide very rapidly whether to go with it or get scooped. Which leads them to make not-entirely-well-advised decisions. If the story is real we want to be first off the line with it. Can we afford the time to check it out and make sure it's real? Nah. Let's just roll with it.

And most of the time it works. But with twitter &c., it's going to become less and less so, and we'll get more and more of these little embarrassments.

O..O
=o=