The reporting convention, at newspapers and magazines, was, and is—those were the days of Woodward and Bernstein, and Sy Hersh—to interview two people, two "sources," and if they bear each other out, to run the story. When a government institution—the Church Committee on Intelligence, for example—issues a report, which commonly runs to several volumes and to many thousands of pages, the convention is to run with the accompanying press release. No reporter has the time or patience or temperament to wade through those documents. So the conventions exist: either the press release, or the word of
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