Apparently, Daniel Patrick Moynihan got it backward when he said everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.

The late senator’s axiom expressed a principle that until a few days ago cemented the wall between news and commentary at decent newspapers. We’ve labored under a delusion that it’s vital to protect reporting from encroachments by ideologies, whether of owners, senior editors, or individual writers. Our first duty was, we thought, to inform readers, tell them what was really going on, and only secondarily to persuade them to a particular point of view.