Was Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger’s naked body scattered ’round with sleeping pills? Did he die in Mary-Kate Olsen’s New York apartment? No and no. But that didn’t stop certain media websites from reporting those snippets as facts. Did those sites, the New York Times notably among them, get the Ledger story wrong?

No. An NYPD spokesman got his story mixed up. But by the time he got it unmixed, reporters had already fired the “news” digitally around the world.

Such are the dangers of “speed reporting” in the Internet age, according to Editor & Publisher and a Los Angeles Times entertainment blog:

But here’s the problem…Journalists have generally had hours - not minutes or seconds - to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell. What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process - reporting - as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

Conservative/liberal media bias aside, how skeptical are you of news outlets’ basic reporting of facts? Have changes in news delivery caused you to take a “wait and see” attitude about what is true and what is not? Would you prefer faulty “up to the minute” news that gets tweaked as time goes by, or that reporters verify the facts before breaking a story?