Another 'there but for the grace of God goes my company' fiasco.

We all know that on any given day the Facebook crowd could crucify any given airline for something. This time it's United. You'll be pithed and dissected for a week or two until the corporate organism moves on to some other story. It's what people and the press do.

I'm not anti press. They serve a valuable function. But how many times has each of us read some airline story and not found twelve different things wrong with it, and then blithely gone on to swallow every detail of some other story about something we're not experts about? Happens all the time, and you should be aware of it. Reporters are fallible people, made more fallible because of the time constraints their craft has to work with.

I'm not saying there wasn't a wrong here that should be made right. Again: not anti press. But in the digital era nobody takes time out to separate fact from fantasy. Grains of salt are in short supply.