...Nevertheless, this is not a good moment for the bustling, energetic Wild West of the new Internet media. Remember when a former CBS executive described bloggers as guys in pajamas writing in their living rooms? Well, it seems that many have only one exercise routine: jumping to conclusions.

In the hours between captivity and true freedom, Carroll was seen in one propaganda film describing the mujahideen as ''good people fighting an honorable fight" and in another interview saying she was never threatened. An online jeering section bought it hook, line, and sinker without waiting to hear that the videos were made under threat. As Alex Jones of Harvard's Shorenstein Center said, ''They were gulled by a clever piece of propaganda and ought to be ashamed of themselves."...

...At a popular site on the left, there was scorn for the ''totally inappropriate" assumptions that Carroll's warm words about her captors could be ''motivated by anything other than a desire to tell the truth."

Yet one day later, once she was safely out of Iraq, Carroll issued a statement repudiating the ''things that I was forced to say while captive." She bitterly labeled the men who kidnapped her and murdered her translator, Alan Enwiya, as ''criminals, at best." What she thought of the opinionated prodigies who couldn't wait to climb on their soapboxes and tell the world what to think about her, Carroll didn't say. Perhaps she was being polite. Perhaps, unlike them, she prefers to think before she vents.

With the swelling influence of the Internet and the blogosphere, the pressure to generate instant commentary is only going to grow more intense. But it is a deeply unhealthy impulse, and commentators -- in every medium -- should resist it. It's nice to be first. It's better to be right.