Will Something as Innocent As a Blog Cause the Next Newsweek Scandal???

After our class engaged in a brief discussion on Tuesday discussing the merits/dangers of an unfiltered, non regulated Internet where free speech reigns, I remembered reading the following short blog on the Washington Post's Web site by Joel Achenbach. Achenbach questions the role of groupthink the Internet can bring on. He offers the question of whether this groupthink will cause the masses who read blogs and other online discusssions to simply believe everything they read, which can lead to chaos.

Yes we all expect a major situation if a journalistic entity like Newsweek makes a critical mistake and prints inaccurate information, but what happens when an unregulated blog prints something incorrectly? Could an otherwise non-noteworthy blog become a big deal if something it prints (whether it is verified or not) suddenly becomes newsworthy or the topic of conversation across the globe?