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> if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work. That's interesting. Can you elaborat

• whatshisface 5y ago
  Let's say contemporary journalists are considering three separate stories that could tie together the facts, with each story tying together a random subset, about half of the facts each. If the journalists decide on one story, and ignore the half that it doesn't tie together as irrelevant, a large number of things that could actually be important would go unrecorded - if they were wrong to focus on that one story out of the ones they were considering, which may not even have included the real trend driving it all. It's also worth nothing that false claims made by important people are historically significant, but a paper that's trying to build a cohesive narrative but lacked the ability to outright quote something and call it false (for cultural reasons, stating the author's position on a quote is considered too aggressively opinionated for something published in the news section of a paper), would probably choose not to report the quotes.