I spoke with Professor Isaacs about the Reuters wire. He pointed out that news services won't run a wire report if they don't believe it. If, say, the New York Times, wanted to pick up this Reuters wire, they might have tried to check it out themselves first. Newspapers don't usually run articles debunking a wire report they couldn't check out. I can see why this would make sense from the newspaper's point of view--what's the point? A report debunking such a report would look kind of weird in a newspaper that never ran the article in the first place.

But in the age of the web and google, and on the birthday of the most compelling family of conspiracy theories, we might want to reflect on that convention. How is a wire report reading public supposed to discern the difference between what's news that can't be checked out and what's news that major news companies don't want us to read?