Despite being a (cough) blogger, I'm the first to admit that our insatiable, Web-driven, 1,440-minute news cycle is annoying. Drudge. Halperin. Politico. The endless game of "gotcha." But this week, the Internet proved that what it buildeth up--namely, a story about Obama "refusing" to bestow his trademark fist pound on a young Ohioan--it can also teareth down. And, as Martha Stewart would say, that's a good thing.

Since the start of the modern media age, tiny, telling details--images or quotes that seem to substantiate our suspicions about a candidate--have repeatedly reoriented the narrative of entire campaigns. Muskie's tears (actually snowflakes) convinced us he was unstable. Dukakis's helmet "revealed" that he wasn't a credible Commander in Chief. And Kerry's predilection for Swiss on his cheesesteak screamed "snob." Once these impressions take hold, they're typically difficult to dislodge--even if they're not particularly accurate.

On February 5,  1992, for example, President George H.W. Bush, then running for reelection, visited the National Grocers Convention in Orlando, Fla., where he took particular interest in a mock-up of a checkout lane. Bush signed his name electronically. He swiped a quart of milk. "Amazed by some of the technology," he said. The lone newspaperman covering the event, Gregg McDonald, noted in his two-paragraph pool report that Bush had a "look of wonder" on his face at the time, but didn't feel the scene merited a mention in his own story for the Houston Chronicle. (A pool report is a dispatch passed along to other journos who can't attend an event because of space limitations.) The next day, however, Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times transformed McDonald's description into a chiding front-pager about Bush's lack of familiarity with the details of ordinary American life. The "out of touch" theme quickly caught on. Soon, the Boston Globe quipped that  someone should tell Bush, elected as vice president twelve years earlier, about video rentals, ATM cards and recycling as well, while the Times reminded its readers that "upper-income Americans" like the president "hardly experience the problems that weigh so heavily on American society"--a "fact" that "has dangerous political consequences."

The only hitch? The press got the incident all wrong. Turns out that the device that impressed the prez wasn't a regular scanner but rather a prototype that could "weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes." After at least a week of media mockery, a handful of reporters reviewed a video of the event and concluded that Rosenthal--who wasn't even there--had blown it way out of proportion. "Bush acts curious and polite, but hardly amazed," wrote Newsweek. "It was prosaic, polite talk," added Time. "If anything, he was bored." But by then, it was too late. Slipping toward recession, the country skipped the swell who didn't know his way around a supermarket in favor of a blue-collar upstart who could "feel their pain."

I bring up the Bush incident because something remarkably similar happened--or started to happen--this week with Obama. On Tuesday,  the Democratic nominee visited the Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. In a report posted that afternoon, the pooler wrote that "not much [happened] in the way of news," but closed with this bit of color: "As he left, a boy tried to give him a fist bump. Obama said no. 'If I start that …' his voice trailed off." The fist pound, of course, has become something of an Obama signature in recent weeks, and when I read those lines, I knew that the press, starved as it is for actual news in these dog days of summer, would pick them up. I wasn't disappointed. First it was the Politico. Then Halperin jumped on board. By dinnertime, the chatterati had transformed Obama's refusal to knock knuckles with an adoring child into a metaphor for its new favorite narrative--Obama as a typical, calculating pol. "He just keeps moving to the center," wrote the Washington Post. "So conventional," added Maureen Dowd. "This makes us sad on so many levels," concluded New York magazine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the checkout line. When Obama read the reports, he told his staff that they were wrong. So they demanded a review, and Sunlen Miller of ABC News, upon examining a video of the event, discovered that the Illinois senator was (gasp!) right. So she transcribed the actual exchange and uploaded it to ABC's blog:

Boy: Can you sign my hand?

Obama: If I start that…plus Mom might not be happy when she comes home. She’ll be like, ‘what is the dirt on your hand?’…see ya.

Boy: Can you sign it in pen so it will come off?

Then, the boy raised his fist to get Mr. Obama’s attention as he asked for a signature. Instead, he signed an autograph in crayon on pictures they had been drawing.

By the end of the day, New York magazine and the Washington Post had affixed corrections to their original items. Every major political blog in the country had posted a version of Miller's report. The Dowd column--the highest-profile record of Obama's "refusal"--was even scrubbed of any trace of fists bumping (or not not bumping, as it were). This isn't to say that the press should be applauded for its courage or something. Hardly. But it is worth nothing that none of this was possible in 1992, when the media moved at the speed of newsprint--the immediate video review, the immediate correction, the immediate quieting of the cable chatter. By the time anyone reported that Bush wasn't actually "out of touch," it was too late. But the boy from Zanesville vanished before the vast majority of voters ever met him. And when it comes to not-so-telling details, that's progress.

Now, if only we bloggers would stop salivating over this stuff in the first place...