I think it is worse than that. I was actually actively involved in the process of looking through those photos on /r/Boston at the time and the whole "red herring" story was not organic to that process and just seemed to be something that an outside group of trolls (maybe outside of Reddit or outside of r/Boston) decided to bandwagon and got it picked up by the media. Nobody really involved in the process really bought into it. I always feel like the "internet detectives" got a bad rap.

Maybe the lesson to be learned is that the media needs to know what they are dealing with before going with the "Reddit says" storyline.