JEFF JARVIS: “One terrible lesson of the West Virginia mine tragedy is that you can’t trust the news. You never could; it has always taken time to see whether stories pan out, to get all the facts, to find out the truth. But now, in our age of instant news and ubiquitous communication, the public sees this process as it occurs. It’s not the news that’s live; it’s the process of figuring out what to believe that’s live.”

Yes. As I noted in my earlier post, it’s not so much that I blame them for getting the story wrong — everybody makes mistakes — it’s that I know that if a blogger made a similar error, with similar consequences, Anderson Cooper would be among those blaming the “undisciplined, editor-free” blogosphere. In fact, we saw a bit of that last year when bloggers were blamed for talking about news organizations’ own — wrong — leaked exit polls.

Meanwhile, here’s a blogger’s firsthand report. “Be careful, though, trying to pin the blame for this fiasco on the media. There is a difference between spreading a rumor and reporting that a rumor is spreading. Don’t think so? Try to imagine a scenario where live cameras pointing at the church could have avoided showing the jubilation that erupted there when the despicable rumor began that the twelve were alive.” Well, yes. But again, I don’t think they’d cut non-traditional media the same slack. They certainly haven’t done so in the past.