The 24-hour news cycle is more demanding than the available news. So they go casting about.
Here there really isn't any information, so they read off what they find elsewhere. Then those sites start citing the media, and we get a feedback effect that amplifies the non-information. So, this nonsense about people sending cellphone messages. BS.
When members of the news media starts reading off posts on a website, whatever claim to authority that website has disappears very quickly, as the site becomes the focus of attention and of people with all kinds of weird motivations. It's far easier for someone to make a post that sounds authoritative and factual than for someone to make one from authority or containing facts. So, after every recent accident of note, the PPRuNe thread gets inundated with noise for the first 72 hours or so, as verisimilar jockeys try to put up every unimaginable combination to sound important. And I'm sure the moderators are deleting thousands of posts, including some pertinent ones that only seem superfluous.
So, I must clarify something. When in answering a post asking what Richard Quest's PPRuNe username might be, I speculated "Speedbird Yoke Peter". My rationale was that such a username would be homage to the hand-in-hand work that the European press and the safety organizations did to improve safety in the aftermath of the tragic loss of the BOAC Comet (YP) off of Elba at the dawn of the Jet Age. I did not mean in any way to refer to the tabloid reports of the lurid circumstances surrounding the alleged arrest of Mr. Quest in Central Park, and I apologise if my speculation was taken in that way.