On Tuesday afternoon a headline flashed across The Business Insider blog: “IT BEGINS: Gatorade Discontinues Tiger Line.”

Here’s the post from The Business Insider deputy editor Joe Weisenthal:

It is laughable if it were true.

If you actually read the story from CNBC, which this post doesn’t link to, it says: “Critics might say that Gatorade is just reacting to the recent news, but industry trade Beverage Digest actually reported the discontinuation of the Gatorade Tiger Focus line on Nov. 25, two days before the accident occurred.”

The Beverage Digest story is locked down to nonsubscribers, so we’ll just take CNBC’s word for it.

UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune spoke with Beverage Digest editor John Sicher, who confirmed that he heard about Gatorade's decision last month.

As you may have noted by now, Weisenthal failed to include this fact in his post. Seems a bit insidious, doesn't it? Without a link to CNBC, he has to assume most readers won’t check his facts. Then again, maybe he's just lazy, or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, rushed. After all, the CNBC story is a whole seven paragraphs long.

One enterprising reader did read the entire CNBC story and pointed out Weisenthal's oversight in the comments. Here's that reader's comment:

At this point, you'd probably expect Weisenthal to acknowledge the oversight and drop an update in his post. Instead, he offered this remark in the comments:

So let's get this straight. Without an update or retraction, Weisenthal is assuming that Gatorade is full of it. His comment seems to suggest that he's sticking to his guns and that soon enough the truth will be revealed. This means that—since Beverage Digest reported on the move two days before the incident outside Tiger's home—Weisenthal is suggesting that Gatorade not only knew that Tiger was cheating on his wife—which could be true—but also foresaw that he would get in a one-car accident outside his mansion while allegedly fired up on booze and pharmaceutical drugs and that's why Gatorade discontinued it's Tiger focus line.

Right.

Facts are so inconvenient.