The LAT’s Patrick Goldstein has a nice little analysis of how a bad piece of information gets ricocheted around Hollywood. It is written, in typically Patrick Goldstein fashion, soberly, carefully and with humility, including a nod to his own fallibility and a cite of his own organization’s role in helping the bad information get around.

(It was about Juan Antonio Bayona supposedly being tapped to direct the third Twilight installment. Not really earth-shattering, but that’s big news amongst the folks he’s writing about.)

Anyway, Crazy Nikki has a starring role, being the person who got it wrong first. Then Variety chimed in, as did other film news sites, including a blog at the LAT.

Goldstein, as I said, carefully goes back and re-constructs what happened, speaking to everyone involved, including the head of the studio.

So Nikki Finke, who is fond of using the hedline “TOLDJA!!” when she is right and forgetting when she is wrong, responds and … goes nuts. The funniest thing about her response is a long preliminary digression about the head of the studio laying down a rule that only he can talk to the press, when Goldstein wrote nothing about that at all.

The second funniest thing is how she tries to defend her original news tidbit by pointing out its weasely wording. This is a classic fallback of bad journalists: “Well, all I really said was that someone said something was true, and he did say that, so what I wrote was correct!”

The third funniest thing is that she pegs the whole thing to the head of the studio apologizing to her. Shouldn’t she be apologizing to her readers?

The issue here isn’t whether Bayona ultimately gets the job, which he might. Read the whole exchange carefully and you can see that Finke also didn’t have Goldstein’s detail that the director in question had met with Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series. (She said flatly that he hadn’t.) Finke would have had her scoop if she’d done a little more reporting, found out about the Meyer meeting, and simply said what might indeed be the truth—that Bayona was the current leading candidate inside the studio and that Meyer hadn’t vetoed him. But the humility gene is one Finke doesn’t have.