Why is breaking news so often wrong?

Because in the first hours of an unfolding event almost nobody has reliable information, and the pressure to publish is at its maximum precisely when the evidence is at its weakest.

The structural causes:

Verification takes longer than publication. Confirming a fact requires contacting sources, cross-checking and waiting for official statements. Publishing takes seconds. Competitive pressure rewards the first, and the cost of being wrong arrives later than the benefit of being first.

Early official information is often wrong too. Casualty figures, causes and identities are frequently revised as authorities themselves learn more. An outlet accurately reporting what officials said at the time can still be reporting something untrue.

Eyewitnesses are unreliable. Not dishonest — human memory under stress is genuinely poor, and witnesses reconstruct rather than record. Multiple witnesses agreeing is weaker evidence than it feels, because they influence each other.

Social media amplifies unverified material faster than newsrooms can check it, and old footage from unrelated events reliably recirculates as new.

Continuous coverage must be filled. Rolling broadcast and live blogs have airtime and space regardless of whether new information exists, which pulls speculation into the gap.

Well-documented recurring errors: wrongly identifying suspects, premature death reports, casualty counts that change by an order of magnitude, and attributing motive within hours.

What to do as a reader: treat the first several hours as provisional. Prefer sources naming who told them and how they know. Watch for hedging language — "unconfirmed", "reports suggest" — and take it literally rather than as filler. Check back later rather than assuming the early version stood.

The generalisable rule is that certainty in the first hour is a warning sign, not a strength.