Harry McCracken has some useful advice for how to treat news you see on Twitter: treat it as a lead, not as verified fact. Where I partially disagree with him is here:

1) Part of the reason why information travels quickly on Twitter is that it's not fact-checked. (Or more precisely, it's fact-checked after the fact, when people realize the original tweets were wrong.)

2) Part of the reason news travels a bit more slowly via old-media sources is that it is fact-checked.

Some of the news on old media is fact checked. There are plenty of "too good to check" stories out there, and plenty of agenda driven things running around as well. The old media are pretty good about fact checking things like death reports, but they can be downright useless on a lot of other stuff - consider Eason Jordan's admissions about CNN for one thing...

You have to apply McCracken's "consider the source" conclusion to all media - not just Twitter...

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