> You can't find the truth by averaging lies, half truths and omissions together. Three things: 1. Even working from my initial cynical assumption, "using con

> You can't find the truth by averaging lies, half truths and omissions together. Three things: 1. Even working from my initial cynical assumption, "using context clues" in no way implies "averaging lies". It means knowing the bounds within which certain spokespeople lie, when a conflict of interest is likely causing an omission, etc. Reporters do this kind of digging with government spokespeople every single day. Even if the insights are limited to information about internal infighting within the government, that is still of greater value than Facebook clickbait that gives a false history to a typo. 2. I'm confused-- are you constraining yourself to argue within the bounds of my thought experiment that all journalists are paid shills? Or are you implying that my thought experiment maps (more or less) perfectly onto reality? If it's the latter it is trivially disproven by the investigative journalism of people like David Barstow, Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Scahill, Jim Risen... well, Google them and you'll quickly get the refutation to "paid shills doing the bidding of their customers". 3. Your last two sentences are essentially a restatement of investigative journalism. I am a fan of investigative journalism.