Today’s Crikey email starts with a list of “things declared dead as a result of the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig and subsequent oil spill (53,000 barrels a day before the well was capped)” and includes this (now famous) image of dead fish in Louisiana:

Dead fish that, for once, are not BP’s fault.

Thing is, as even the update at the bottom of the story to which Crikey links notes:

UPDATE: The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries investigated the fish kill and determined that it was the result of low oxygen levels caused by low tides and high temperatures.

This correction is a few days old on the Internet, and any Google search after about Friday would’ve shown that this undoubtedly very memorable image (it really does look like a winding road on a warm summer’s day, doesn’t it?) is not actually related to BP’s destruction of the Gulf. (It appears, from the other links, to be related not just to tides and sun, but to run-off pollutants from an entirely different industry, which I suspect is thanking its lucky stars that BP is going to be a useful scapegoat in the area for years to come.)

The upshot of which is, so far as this report is concerned, the real culprits get off scot-free, and the other presumably legitimate claims about BP’s actual culpability are undermined.

So this highlights the potential hazards of news organisations relying on internet sites for timely information rather than checking the details themselves; and for them forgetting that internet sites can issue updates and corrections at any time. It raises an interesting question: should independent internet media at least check their sources for updates before publication? How close to publication? The Crikey story above has 16 links: do I expect the unnamed author to check every one of them today before uploading? Well, no, not all of them – but the ones that are relied on for specific allegations as to possibly disputed facts, perhaps a quick run through within a few hours of the uploading should be part of the process. Then again, maybe it was – maybe the post was in fact uploaded on Friday, ready for Monday’s daily mail, and nobody checked the details again.

Still, maybe there should be an obligation, when repeating an allegation about somebody, to make sure that at least you’re up to date with your sources when you hit publish, particularly if there’s a several-day-lag between you reading that source and you quoting them.

Ah well. I’m sure there’ll be a correction tomorrow.