automatic journalism

Amidst all the turbulences on the financial markets these days, a funny event some days ago got less attention than it might have deserved: A newspaper article from 2002 titled "United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy" got picked up by Google News, was falsely presented as a new story there, was again picked up by the Bloomberg financial news agency, and this led to a drastic plunge in United Airlines shares. Apparently after a certain stage the selling of shares was also automatic - there are computer programmes for this... About a billion dollars of market value were lost before trading was stopped! Afterwards, a blame game started between the Tribune company which owns the newspaper (the South Florida Sun-Sentinel) and Google. (Of course, Google News functions without any editor, it is a totally automatic search engine.) The New York Times explained:

Tribune said in a statement that its archived bankruptcy article had simply been there online all along. The statement blamed “the inability of Google’s automated search agent ‘Googlebot’ to differentiate between breaking news and frequently viewed stories on the Web sites of its newspapers” for the problem.
For its part, Google said it was unfair to blame it for Tribune’s mistakes, including the failure to date the article properly, and the failure to use one of many simple methods to prevent links to old articles from appearing on a news page or being seen by a search engine.

Sounds quite technical to me... What about letting human beings with a brain come in between all the engines sometimes?