A colleague from a TV news network was telling me the other day that its informal slogan was now “Never wrong for long.” News goes on air as it emerges in a furious competitive scramble, and then if it proves inaccurate it is supplanted rather than corrected.

That, I guess, is what is meant by the new “churnalism.” So intense is the churn that nothing has much weight. Accuracy sometimes seems a quaint journalistic concept. As for truth, it belongs to a distinct moral universe.

On the 11th anniversary of 9/11 the Middle East has erupted, driven by a meme — one of those notions that spreads across the new media ecosystem at lightning speed once a spark has been provided, in this case a pitiful porn-like trailer for a movie in which the Prophet Muhammad appears as a highly sexed buffoon.

The movie was initially attributed to a Jew who proved not to exist although he had given interviews to The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal. It was later found to be the work of right-wing Christians in California, one a convicted felon. They were aided by a member of the Coptic diaspora in Washington who managed to propel a clip onto a popular Salafist TV station in Cairo, setting off riots across the Islamic world that drove up the clicks for the trailer on YouTube. Suddenly “Innocence of Muslims” was trending.

The whole thing sounds like a bad churnalistic joke. But of course people are dead and the least funny aspect is this really is the world we live in. (The offending video almost makes one nostalgic for the time a century ago when conflagrations were set off not by meta-events but by something as tangible as Gavrilo Princip’s bullet.)

Argument now rages over whether U.S. diplomats killed in the convulsion were the victims of a planned or spontaneous assault or some combination of the two. In Republican eyes, the more planned the killing was the more President Obama is at fault. The facts, as Mitt Romney’s various hallucinogenic outbursts on the subject illustrate, are secondary to the agenda.

Before I get to what all this says about the new Middle East, a little more on the new media landscape.

In a hyperconnected world possibilities increase for a minority of extremists to manipulate the moderate middle: Look at what a handful of idiots in California helped ignite.

But memes don’t just happen through curious symbiosis. As Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” told me, “It’s not necessarily true that memes are born rather than made.” In this case, a ferociously anti-Islamic Copt named Morris Sadek labored hard to interest an Egyptian journalist in the movie; only then did the infernal cascade begin.

New media often need the help of mainstream media before viral critical mass is achieved. Once it is, the algorithms kick in. Outfits like YouTube are agnostic intermediaries. They want, as Morozov put it, “more clicks, more traffic, more knowledge about viewers and so more advertising.”

And here we are after a week of engineered tumult. The right thinks its case is proved: “You see, we told you so, the Arab Spring was a false dawn. Muslims are incapable of democracy. They are all anti-Western fanatics. Obama was wrong to support the democratic transformation that has brought Islamic parties to power.”

The White House is on the defensive; it even requested at one point that Google, the parent of YouTube, consider removing the movie — an ill-considered request wisely resisted. Free speech is meaningless if it does not extend even to views that are loathsome.

In fact the violence does not change the critical evolution underway in the Arab world, one that needed more support from Obama, not less. Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president, was slow to react to violence. But it is far better to have his Muslim Brotherhood grappling with Islamic extremists than an isolated U.S.-backed dictator; and the debate now raging from Cairo to Tunis — a debate that would have been impossible before the Arab Spring — is a necessary part of the slow evolution of societies from terrorist-breeding passivity to citizen-breeding agency.

This change is generational. The folly of this September may be viewed one day as part of the evolution of the Brotherhood toward the conservative pragmatism that has served Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development well in Turkey.

That, I know, is an optimistic scenario. Memes have their own destructive energy. Listen to Benjamin Netanyahu on CNN eliding the truth for maximum panic: “All the things that you see now in these mobs storming the American embassies is what you will see with a regime that would have atomic bombs. You can’t have such people have atomic bombs.”

Who are “such people”? No matter that these were Arabs, not Iranians. No matter that they were far from Tehran. No matter that Persians despise Arabs and vice-versa. Netanyahu understands marketing: keep it simple in a hyperconnected age because you won’t be wrong for long — and the dead can’t issue a correction.