monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I don't recall any 24 hour news coverage of any of Obama's lie by the media. When the whole "If you like your Dr, you can keep your Dr." nonsense was exposed as a lie, there was hardly any news coverage of it.

Grandfathered plans are plans that were purchased before March 23, 2010. These plans have a grandfathered status and don’t have to follow ObamaCare’s rules and regulations or offer the same benefits, rights and protections as new plans.....
....If you like your grandfathered health plan, you can keep it.

Do not use “reports” or “unconfirmed reports” as the basis for a story. You must source every statement in every story unless it is an established fact or is information clearly in the public domain, such as court documents or in instances when the reporter, photographer or camera operator was on the scene.

Just because you have a named source does not mean you are free from responsibility for what you quote the source as saying. Whenever possible, sources should be identified by name and position. Even information from a named source should normally be checked and balanced, especially in a situation of conflict or a negotiation.

“A source” or “sources”, “observers” or “quarters” with no further description is vague and unacceptable. So is the use of “informed sources” or “reliable sources”. Would we quote an uninformed or unreliable source?

In a conflict, dispute or negotiation, always try to speak to all sides, and make clear which side your source is on, or whether the source is a third party. Nor should we quote a source as saying one thing on the record and the opposite, or something that is clearly contradictory, on background.

Every source who talks to a Reuters reporter has a motive. Try to identify that motive and the “spin” that comes with the information, and weigh it against other information you have obtained, generally known background and your own common sense to work out the real story. Your own suspicious mind is one of the best defences against being manipulated. Talk to sources on all sides of an issue, business deal, political dispute, military conflict or diplomatic negotiation. Two sources are always better than one. Seek at least one source from each side.

Listen for what is NOT said as hard as you listen to what is said. Sometimes newsmakers disclose a key change in position when they stop saying something they had talked about openly before. Do your homework and know the subject. A reporter who understands the topic and is up-to-date on the news is less vulnerable to manipulation.

Play devil’s advocate when interviewing. When doing initiative reporting, try to disprove as well as prove your story. Look for knowledgeable, independent third parties to help gauge the reliability of information.

We can never allow our sources to make allegations, contentious statements or vituperative attacks behind a cloak of anonymity. It weakens our credibility and gives the sources an opportunity to benefit at our expense. It is fundamentally unfair to the other party and thus biased..., use them only for facts, not opinions. If a source wants to make a vituperative attack on an individual, organisation, company or country he or she must speak on the record. If the person will not speak on that basis we should not use the story.

But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.

He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies.

That handicapped fella?

Since its founding by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in 1996, Fox News has managed to act as an informal propaganda ministry and ideological enforcer for the Republican Party, even as it simultaneously masquerades as a reputable news organization. Impressed by its profits and the career opportunities it afforded, most journalists participated in the scam by refusing to call it out, no matter how often Fox transgressed the most basic rules of honest reporting. Both in style and in substance, Fox presaged the Trump administration and what my last column called its “Upside-Down Day” method of news management. When journalists did honest reporting on corporate and conservative power, they were accused of “activism” and “liberal bias.” When Fox concocted fake facts and then demanded political fealty to them from politicians and pundits, the network claimed to be presenting news that was “fair 
and balanced.”

...Bill O’Reilly came to Trump’s rescue by booking a fellow named “Nils Bildt,” whom Fox billed as a “Swedish defense and national security advisor.” Bildt came on O’Reilly’s show to back up Trump’s bizarre accusation with intimations of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. “These things are not being openly and honestly discussed,” he intoned. In fact, Bildt himself was a kind of walking alternative fact. He was not any kind of adviser to anyone in Sweden. Actually, he was an immigrant himself, having moved from Sweden to the United States in 1994—and, even more ironically, he was a criminal: Convicted of assaulting a police officer, Bildt was sentenced to a year in a Virginia prison in 2014. When questioned, Bildt told reporters that he had no memory of being in prison that year, but that may have been because he was then living under another name. He also says he has no memory of telling Fox he had the qualifications the network pretended he had.

If you folks are going to read anything today, read this...

He was very rare breed these days - a conservative with empathy.