18 years ago? Are you thinking of Jayson Blair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fabrication_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jays

18 years ago? Are you thinking of Jayson Blair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fabrication_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fa... That broke 15 years ago, not 18. Also, it's a highly relevant example, from the same news outlet as TFA. That's exactly the sort of thing we need better citations for; it would have been way harder to fake all those interviews if he had to upload recordings of them. Harder still if we expected dash-cam footage of him driving around West Virginia. He described video footage that didn't exist -- even if we can justifiably question whether a video was faked or not, releasing the actual video would certainly make it harder to fake than a written description is. Of course absolute evidence is hard, if not impossible; Bertrand Russel spent over 300 pages trying to prove that 1+1=2, and ultimately concluded that he failed. We have to accept that our knowledge is probabilistic, but that doesn't mean we can't try to improve our probabilities of being right. Edit: I removed the mobile part of the URL. Other edit: s/spend/spent