News

A useful rule of thumb with news stories, from the Wall Street Journal to the Daily Mail and NYT: when you read an exciting story, poke it with a long stick before you try to pick it up.

Reporters love the myth that they're diligent seekers of truth, unafraid to talk truth to power. I wonder if that's ever been broadly true. Partisan misrepresentation seems to go back as far as newspapers, and avoiding troublesome investigations seems to have a long history too--with a little more justification in times and places when it was easy to suppress newspapers.