instant memory

I was struck during the coverage of the recent bombing in London of all the cell phone pics and videos as well as the instantaneous "first-hand" accounts that were on the online news sources within seconds. Then this weekend, there was an article in the Globe and Mail that talked about this movement towards non-journalists reporting the news, recalling the "fake" tsunami photo - if it's published, it must be real, right?

But in the rush to get the scoop, how much is published in error, whether well-intentioned or not?

I'm curious about how we could use this phenomenon of "instant reporting" to create some performance scores, inevitably twisting the "news" to our own ends, viewpoints, biases...