Media Lagtime

It might be my recent lackadaisacal attitude towards keeping up on my online reading, but I just found an article on Arts & Letters Daily on the fake virgin olive oil scandal erupting through Italy, with a print date of August 13th. The article is near the top of the Arts & Letters queue, leading me to believe that it was posted relatively recently, vis-a-vis my first experience with the story, which was an extremely early August on National Public Radio.

There are too many variables for me to even begin to wildly postulate or hypothesize on the matter, but the situation does make me wonder about media lag times these days. Much is touted over almost instantaneous correction of Dan Rather through the powers of the dynamic press, but only now am I beginning to see dissemination of information from two months ago. It'd be an interested study for a journalism or English dissertation, and I'm going to have to hack out a means of approaching the topic, unless anybody can point me in the direction of some studies that have already been performed. My gut instinct is that radio/TV are still much more immediately powerful, yet much less flexible than print, but that which was meant to be proven has yet to be...