Speaking of easily and fast spreading news, I took the liberty of putting together a little graph. It shows how this particular piece of information has been traveling around the internet.
Who was the first one?
From most of the articles, I figured out that iMore.com's was the first one. Then allthingsd.com picked it up. And then all the Apple news servers such as theverge.com, macrumors.com, cultofmac.com and appleinsider.com just copy-pasted it. (Which is kind of pathetic). Feelings aside, this would look like a solid, credible information flow.
Source of the source.
The weird part is that even though allthingsd.com used the original iMore.com article as their source, in an edited version of the post, iMore.com sourced back to allthingsd.com. So, it's as convincing of an argument as agreeing with your own opinions.
Credibility?
Even though this particular piece of news is probably true, I can't imagine an easier thing to do than to make up something ridiculous (such as a 4-inch iPhone) and then make sure I send slightly alternated piece of this junk to news-hungry journalists without mentioning my name every week. Or I could just make one up. Then, after a couple of months of hearing a lie, it just becomes a truth and later, a dogma. That could be how we got to those many "sure thing" Apple products that have never seen the surface of the Earth (two Easter Eggs in there), but were supposed to come out years ago.
So again, I might be wrong about the new iPhone. But that doesn't change anything on the fact that these news sites work with such vague information which they sell through ads, that it's actually genius. They make up news, people read it. The crazier news, the more readers they get.