in one story.

Don't watch Fox News, you don't have to put up with it.

I'd have been blissfully unaware of their "field day" and really don't care one way or another about such things. It will blow over. It will pass. And sooner than some observers will think possible. It was good for CNN to do what they did, and a reminder for DUers that have been here for a while that once we had CNN's standard. Sadly, CNN seems to be among the only editorial board that has rediscovered its values and concluded somehow a smidgeon of integrity isn't a bad thing.

An anonymous source is not to be trusted, and single-source stories based on somebody who insists on remaining anonymous is no story at all. If it turns out true, great, somebody knew something that eventually proved true a while before us. If it turns out false, then either we waste time chasing ghosts or, worse, we don't find out that it's false and continue to assume it's true--either way, those who rejected it showed that we were foolish and gullible and believed "fake news."

News with two sources that amount to a single source fall in the same category.

And it doesn't help that, as with those things Mensch said that were false, we simply forget they ever existed. If you don't learn from foolishness, well, there's that.

Now, as far as the CNN story goes, it's not necessarily false. And CNN said that. Except that the requirement for proof is on the person making a claim. The reporters simply didn't have adequate proof besides, "Please, I believe, Blue Fairy, let it be so!" Having a bunch of people in their audience chanting, "Please, I believe, Blue Fairy, let it be so!" makes absolutely no difference. It's embarrassing, actually.

We don't have such abysmally low standards of proof--or at least we shouldn't--at court, in engineering, in science. If somebody comes along and says, "Hey, an anonymous source says your wife is sleeping with another man" you wouldn't file for divorce--you might not even mention it to her. But it would certainly prove corrosive, possibly long term. A lot of people have had standards like that, though, in the courts, engineering, science. And it hasn't been a good thing.