I agree that this problem is not exclusive to the medium, but it is endemic. I mean, many blogs speculated about Adobe's motivation for releasing "free" software, but did anyone pick up a phone or send an email to ask them about it?
It's the price we pay for getting news as fast as we do.
The expectation for immediate news is damaging in a lot of ways, this one is just the worst and most visible.
The idea that getting things fast and wrong is a staple of "media in general" is ridiculous. The vast majority of the media acquitted themselves fine here.
I'm perfectly aware of what I can read. I wish blogs were a bit higher-standard, so I could enjoy them as well without the reservations that it requires.
EDIT: Okay, now that you've ninja-edited in a second paragraph, I'll respond to that too.
Even CNN is guilty of this. "This Just In" during Hurricane Sandy ran some Twitter troll's report of the NYSE flooding. Remember Ryan Lanza? Yep, "This Just In" as well. Half of the rest of the world sees the story on CNN.com and says, hey, that's a confirm, it aired on CNN! It's probably an associate producer manning the desk straight out of J-school, and that big "Publish" button is pretty God damned alluring.
Something about blogs, even under the CNN umbrella, seems to make facts a second-class citizen. "Breaking" doesn't mean the same thing that it did a couple decades ago, and integrity is crumbling with Internet journalism.
Because:
> The contacts that journalists have can usually give a quick off the record "that's not correct" and kill a story like this.
Note the "off the record" part. You can't do something like that with forums; whatever you write there is public and will be regarded as official statement of the company, whether it is or not.
In cases like this where the morality of the company is not in question, journos don't have any reason to distrust the spokespeople. "That's incorrect. Give me ten minutes to call legal." Bam. Dead story.
You'd be surprised how much you can do once you have the right phone numbers. The main switchboard is never the right one.
Other commenter's right, too, there is a lot of institutional knowledge at journalism shops. A casual newsroom "who do we know at Acme?" or "who likes us at the Department of Labor?" almost never goes unanswered.
A wise reporter once told me half of reporting is who will answer the phone, the other is deadlines.
Tech people have this stuff, too, particularly in the backbone transit game. White courtesy phone, that sort of thing; BGP flaps don't go through technical support. Those numbers are guarded closely, though, because they usually ring 3-4 feet from a NOC on-duty engineer.