Some excitable person with a "Web-Log" reads a headline about the Bolivian president offering his resignation in the face of massive protests. The title of his entry: "BOLIVIAN GOVT TOPPLED".
The almighty blogfather Instapundit picks up the "Web-Log's" headline and posts it in a list of perceived misdeeds of Venezuela's president. There it's read by a hundred thousand people.
Had either "Web-Logger" read the Reuters article originally cited, or Juan Forero's reporting in the Times, they would have seen that the president was simply making a political maneuver. His apparent intent was not to resign, but to gain a vote of confidence and energize Bolivian conservatives against the groups protesting.
Disadvantage, blogosphere.
Update: Instapundit has a new post up that alerts people: "The earlier report that its government had fallen appears to have been wrong." It seems to me like a pretty weak remedy. Instapundit is the center of the conservative online backlash against the news media. But the new post reads like a suggestion that some news organization somewhere got it wrong. And it directs readers back to the conservative blog that made the sloppy mistake in the first place.
