Never miiiind: United NOT going under

Like they're not having a tough enough time anyway.
United stock plummeted yesterday after a financial-research firm mistakenly presented a six-year-old Chicago Tribune article on the carrier's 2002 Chapter 11 filing as new information.
Oops.
Shares fell as much as 76 percent before trading was halted for about 90 minutes, then recovered most of the decline.
Who's to blame? It's hard to say with all the fingerpointing going on. This is the way Tom Petruno of the LA Times described the action:

"UAL blamed the mess on a posting of a 2002 Chicago Tribune article on the Florida Sun Sentinel's website.
"The story then was picked up by Income Securities Advisors, a Florida investment newsletter, and disseminated as a one-line brief over Bloomberg News early Monday morning -- triggering a wave of panic selling.
"Tribune Co., the owner of the Sun Sentinel (and also the parent of the Los Angeles Times), initially pointed a finger at Google Inc., saying it appeared that the Internet search engine highlighted the story out of the Sun Sentinel's archives, which generated traffic and caused the newspaper's computer to move the story to a page of most popular articles.
"But Google said the company's search engine never would have bothered with the story if it hadn't been getting a load of hits on the Sun Sentinel site -- and with the weekend date on it, instead of the original 2002 date.
" 'It became a new item that said, "Hey, look here," ' said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman.
" A Tribune spokesman said the company was 'still looking into' the matter."

Welcome to the brave new world of always-on, real-time communication, in which the wildest of rumors can be launched, virally disseminated, and debunked -- sort of -- in a matter of hours. Even by mistake.