There's also a place for journalists who leave the assembly to the critical-thinking reader and future historians, knowing that if they tried too much analysis, it would leave a permanent imprint on the record and potentially frustrate later work.
I can't really tell if that is 100% true, but I think it might be. I think confirmation bias could be looked at through this lens. We have an internal story that makes sense to us, and we tend to give more weight to data that fits our internal story (narrative) and discard the rest.
I don't know really, I'm more thinking out loud here than trying to present The Truth.
That's interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
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.