Reply #24: Truthout, Leopold, Pitt, Ash and a woman from TO whose name I

[HereSince1628]

don't remember, didn't even keep with a single story line regarding what 24 hours means, and how many sources there were. Moreover, as the identitifying characteristics of the sources changed it raised questions about whether they were adequately close to events to actually be able to give reports less than two or three people removed from first hand information.

No one would imagine that a careful, sane, sober, balanced, responsible author or editor would take such a tremendous risk knowing it was phoney. We as readers are left to our own varying capacities of belief on those points. We have no way of knowing if all four aforementioned people actually have all five aforementioned characteristics anymore than we can know if the stories (the Friday story did end up merged into the Saturday story) are actually based on any partictular number of sources ranging from 2 to 8.

Setting aside the astounding nature of the Saturday story including incredible claims like 15 hour visits by Fitzgerald to the defense law offices and redefinitions concerning the meaning of the seemingly transparent phrase "24 hours," no story should require 6 or more supporting posts and at least 2 radio appearances to secure itself. Either the damn story was sound and Truthout editors believed it or they didn't, enough said. Their willingness to shift and shuffle to accomodate questioning by readers betrayed weakness in the original product. The frequent rationalizing and tweaking went a long way to undermining faith in the quality of the original reporting and its editing, and that faith is the only thing readers had to hold their acceptance of the article as true.

Having said all that. In spite of all my personal skepticism I allowed that this damned extraordinary story could just be true. Skepticism isn't a claim to truth; it's only a claim to doubts.