The guy wouldn't have a chance.

Yes... As would any blogger hoping to be topical and leading edge of the news cycles.

Really? Frantically? It concerned you that much that you were frantic for information?

Do you also subscribe to Us magazine? Because you sould like a junior high school girl.

We can put out the basic facts as they become available and update frequently. That's what I did and you can see how I progressed the story here.

Like you, James, I prefer facts to rumors or gossip. But remember that news media don't report what happened, they report what somebody said happened. What journalists and editors worth their salt will do is filter sources for credibility. If that makes them slower than Twitter, then it's a good tradeoff!

Yesterday, a lot of blogs were alive with the "news" that the dead woman with McNair was his wife, Mechelle. never was a named source mentioned, it was either just claimed by the b logger or vaguely attributed to insider sources.

But the Nashville media never even reported that as a rumor. Instead, they properly refrained from speculation and voila, then appeared Mrs. McNair.

If Technosailor thinks that amounts to a failure of the media, then he needs to get a grip. In fact, the Nashville media did a fantastic job covering this story. (I live not far from Nashville.)

Media thrive on two things: primacy and recency. Each outlet wants to be the only outlet covering a story, the proverbial exclusive. If it can't have that, it wants to be first with news and failing that the most recent.

For some reason, it is breaking-news situations that make most outlets shine within that paradigm. When dealing with more analytic issues, the tend to flub rather badly. I think the reason is that reporting breaking news mandates waiting to be given information while "issues" reporting provides opportunities for reporters' reflection, meaning biases, to creep in.

How would we have reacted if TMZ had been wrong about Michael Jackson’s death?

I commented at the time, that it would likely be a lot louder than if the Times had screwed that one up, themselves. Note also that it's a question I doubt we'd ever see TMZ ask. Ya see, we expect the MSM to screw things up.

Had that gone down as posited by the Times, TMZ would have been called every name in the book, and the MSM, the Times included, would have been the ones leading the way. But if the L.A. Times had managed to foul that one up, it would’ve been passed off as some excuse or another; bad communication, bad information and the hurry to get the headline, and so on.

The fact of the matter is that in Jackson and other recent cases, the mainstream media has succeeded in proving itself irrelevant to breaking news.

Not just by its phony devotion to accountability, either.

Let’s face it, with so many mainstream media outlets in the tank for Obama and the Democrat party anyone describing the mainstream media as accountable and unbiased will get laughed out of the room. Their fact finding in such matters has been questionable for decades now.

But now, we see by way of this fast breaking stuff that their fact finding can't stand up to the rigors of today's communications, either. By the time they get around to telling us about it, it's yesterday's news, and thereby only good for birdcage liner.

Which may explain, come to think of it, why the mainstream media is the last one to know of its own irrelevancy.

And thing is, it's been their own doing.

How would delaying the news of Michael Jackson's or Steve McNair's death by six hours have affected any of these immediate information consumers' lives? On a personal, as well as societal, level is immediate news junkie gratification worth the cost in accuracy? How is this making the world a better place?