“They stumble, that run fast”
— William Shakespeare ( Romeo and Juliet )

They wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore.

Two weeks before leaving office in 2007, British Prime Minister Tony Blair aimed a withering attack at his nation’s news media. Taking no prisoners, Blair charged that journalists had created a supercharged atmosphere driven by 24-hour news technology and an emphasis on “impact” and “heat.” He said they stressed “sensation above all else.”

He declared, “We are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact.” He equated news media to a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

He claimed that loss of audiences by traditional newspapers and evening news broadcasts to 24-hour cable news and the Internet created an environment that required media to increasingly compete for attention and forced politicians into a mode of perpetual reaction that served no good purpose.

He said that when he campaigned for election in 1997, “we took an issue a day.” But “in 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon, and by the evening the agenda had already moved on.”

He said that nuances become casualties in news coverage that paints issues in black and white. In the shrill, hyperbolic vocabulary of mediaspeak, he added, a setback becomes “a policy in tatters,” mere criticism a “savage attack.”

The relationship between public life and the news media “is now damaged in a manner that requires repair,” he went on. “The damage saps . . . confidence and self-belief . . . it reduces our capacity to make the right decisions, in the right spirit, for our future.”

Blair did not come away unscathed from his assault on media; the counterattack was swift and understandably harsh. Skeptics dismissed his remarks as self-serving payback for aggressive media investigations of scandals in his government and their criticism of his unwavering support for President George W. Bush and the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Indeed, inescapable here was the irony of Blair, the ardent media spinner, now outraged by media spin; Blair, the maestro of manipulation, now complaining bitterly of being manipulated by media.

Yet Blair was on to something as he prepared to leave 10 Downing Street. His hypocrisy notwithstanding, the much maligned 24-hour news cycle had already shrunk to something like 24 minutes by the time he delivered his blistering critique of UK media, and some of his remarks had bulls-eyed a deserving target. In his crosshairs—transcending nations’ borders, partisan rhetoric and the usual back-and-forth between the outgoing Blair and his critics—was something that continues to beguile and bedevil U.S. media at least as much as it does their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.

That something is speed.

Reckless speed.

The speed of media pushing their pedals to the metal at any cost while racing blindly into today’s new-age data stream. Blair’s farewell flip-off—regarding pressures on newsmakers to respond to the accelerated news cycle—was reinforced in the U.S. five days before the 2008 Texas primary and caucuses. The occasion was Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s attention-grabbing “dangerous world” TV ad that aired in Texas at 7 a.m. It pictured kiddies slumbering peacefully as a dangerous crisis broke, and a voice declaring, “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” Last scene: It’s Clinton who has answered, calm, confident, in command.

A guns-blazing assault on her Democratic foe Barack Obama’s slender foreign policy creds, the Clinton spot immediately rocketed across the blogosphere, followed later that day by a super-swift rebuttal by Obama’s campaign. By noon, his people had whipped up a 30-second response ad that was quickly sped to broadcast and cable networks and uploaded to YouTube— before that evening’s newscasts. Which was significant, for as Brian Stelter wrote in The New York Times, “This may be the year politics finally moves at the speed of the Internet.”

He was right. Created to make news, Obama’s catch-up counterattack was a response not only to Clinton, but more essentially to the media’s own stunning pace that, in many ways, had already been shaping the 2007–2008 presidential election campaign.

Nor is obsession with speed exclusive to U.S. media. As Blair noted, Brits, too, are bonkers for it. In his book, Flat Earth News, prominent UK journalist Nick Davies describes the manic, high speed “churnalism”—a hybrid of churn and journalism—that he says has overtaken news websites in his country, notably that of the BBC. The clash of traditional journalism and this new “churnalism” echoes loudly in the official BBC guide distributed to online staff, he writes. “On the one hand, it urges: ‘Your story MUST be accurate, impartial, balanced and uphold the values of BBC News. . . . NEVER publish anything that you do not understand, that is speculation or inadequately sourced.’ And then, as if there were no contradiction at all,” Davies adds, the guide continues: ‘Get the story up as fast as you can… We encourage a sense of urgency—we want to be first.’”

The message? Like the all-powerful wiz pushing levers behind a curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” speed is calling the shots.

Why should anyone bloody well care?

For one thing, “it is absolutely true, and anybody who says otherwise is slinging bullshit, that every mistake that’s made in the news business is made because of speed,” says Keith McCallister, former executive vice president and managing editor for CNN’s national newsgathering.

For another, the faster-and-faster crowd is gaining ever more stature with the public, with surveys showing that most Americans (especially those under 30) have lost faith in traditional media and prefer the Internet as a primary news source.

For another, media and inaccuracy, after a flirting through the ages, are now in a steamy lip lock. “Even when the first read (of a story) is not always true,” notes Washington D.C.-based talk radio host Bill Press, “that doesn’t stop it from spreading like wildfire.”

Examples abound, as when a powerful politician was cut down prematurely by The Fox News Channel in runaway madcap overdrive. It began on the morning of March 10, 2008 after The New York Times website reported that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer—a former hooker-busting prosecutor—had been linked to a Washington D.C.-based prostitution ring.

The 24-hour news channels immediately pounced and began speculating wildly about Spitzer and his future. But it was Fox and anchor Shephard Smith who blew like Vesuvius. The sequence began with Smith quoting “sources” that Spitzer was expected to resign “just minutes from now.” Then came Smith’s announcement that Spitzer had resigned during a brief televised statement he’d made to the media. “He came in, he resigned and that was

it,” said the ever-emphatic Smith, who then began speculating with his guests about what the administration of Spitzer’s successor, Lt. Gov. David Paterson, would be like. Very relevant, very incisive and above all, very fast.

Except that Spitzer had not resigned.

Minutes later Smith corrected himself, blaming the mistake on two sources, one a Fox executive. Some 45 minutes after that, a Fox headline reported: “N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer Expected to Resign Later Today.” It was another misfire, as was Fox’s entire push-it-out-fast-and-faster approach to the story that morning (actually, the governor would wait two days before announcing he would step down), which also included reporting that Spitzer had been “indicted.”

Also not true, Greta Van Susteren, the attorney who hosts Fox’s “On the Record” legal series, told Shephard later. After quickly thumbing through legal documents that had been released to the media minutes earlier, she warned: “I think we gotta really dial back on this, Shep.”

Dialing back is not is in the electronic media’s DNA, especially when it comes to sex scandals that threaten the high and mighty. The speed of that coverage shoves offenders out the door—witness the instant vaporization of Spitzer’s political career because of that alleged tryst with a high-priced call girl. With little time to regroup, today’s scandalized politicians are usually gone like that, so fast does news travel in the Internet era. That speed “forces (them) to make decisions more quickly. You can’t sit back and reflect,” Harvard lecturer Tom Fiedler told The Washington Post.