"Rioting" at the New Apple Store?

According to this article, there was a riot at the opening of the latest Apple store in NYC. Interesting that no one else, not other Mac News web sites, other bloggers, other online or "mainstream" media, all of whom were in attendance, witnessed or reported this "riot". And when reading the article, even the writer of the story doesn't describe a "riot" as much as juvenile behavior on the part of line jumpers. Hardly a "riot" by any definition.

I attempted to correct the original author of the story in the Comments section of the article but the site's moderators did not post my comment.

To make matters worse, the article gets picked up by MacObserver among others.

When the MacObserver reporter was informed that, not only was the article attributed incorrectly to the owner of the PowerPage, Jason O'Grady (since corrected), but that the "rioting" aspect of the headline seems out of place with other reports, the MacObserver reporter simply said, "I just report the news. I don't make it."

That would be fine if The MacObserver had reported the story correctly the first time. They didn't. And by using the dodge of "I just report the news", the MacObserver shows themselves to be not reporters of news but reporters of whatever the hell they feel like writing about - true or not, factual or not, news or not.

Further, it's this kind of "reporting" that Peter Cohen describes as "The Peeve of Cascading Attributions" - when no one checks anyone else's sources, anything can be passed off as "news" simply because it gets corroboration from some other, equally suspect, source.

A sad day for MacObserver.