Investigative journalism’s credibility rests on costly verification standards.

Evidence

From the researcher’s perspective, the differences between the genres should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: doubleand triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in the case of my books, multiple lawyers in different territories). It’s a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets us as close as we know how to something we all used to agree was proof that something was true. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 739

Categorization

• XREF: The emphasis on verification cost mirrors Milgrom’s institutions literature on how credibility is produced in the reader’s Zettelkasten.