By Monday, the “brawl” that led the late local news the previous night had become merely a “scuffle.” But the damage was done.

Lansing’s Sexton High School took a hit, even though school district officials tried on Monday morning to mitigate the damage. No Sexton students seemed to be involved in what police initially described as a “40 to 50 kids fighting” after the school’s graduation ceremony on Sunday – including gang members with guns. Police took back their initial assessment too – 50 became 15, no reports of an actual assault were taken, and no arrests were made.

But Sexton High School was given a black eye. The fight was already the talk around the water cooler. Pick a cliché: the genie was out of the bottle, the horse out of the barn, the cat out of the bag. A seed of doubt was planted in the minds of parents who might consider sending their students to that school. All because of what seems to have been a bogus story.

So who’s to blame for the damage to this school’s reputation? The media reacted to a breaking news situation outside a significant community event, relying on information from a single official source to frame the story. That source – a police spokesman – exaggerated the extent of the incident by releasing details before fully processing stories from witnesses and multiple officers at the scene. And the Lansing School District seems to have been absent until the next day – when there was no turning back.

In other words, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The moral of the story is to be ready and act immediately to counter any situation that can damage your reputation. You can’t rely on others to accurately tell your story. Reporters often don’t have the time – and too often fail to take the initiative – to fact check an “official” source before publishing a story. Official sources – from police officers to elected leaders to company representatives – get stuff wrong too.

And the targets of these kinds of stories too often wait too long to correct the record. In the age of 24-hour cable news channels, online media and Twitter, if you don’t get ahead of the story quickly, you risk being crushed by it. A scuffle of maybe 15 people becomes a brawl with guns. Fiction becomes fact. And everybody loses.