PSA for Harvard grads too incurious to find out what fact-checking means: fact-checking means verifying falsifiable evidence. Like the spelling of your name or the date you were born or whether a document says what you're saying it does.

Some things are easier to verify than others but at no point is an editorial choice made to guess at whether the fact is correct. Things that can be fact-checked either are, or aren't. If something can't be fact-checked, because there's conflicting information, it is corroborated

This is also how things work in court. There is no omniscient Fact GodTM who descends and says, yes, in this muddy story, here is the absolute truth. Journalists have to suss out what the truth is based on a preponderance of evidence.

And contrary to what the Winklevii apparently think, a denial from one party is not a de facto both-sides are equally valid story. If it were Richard Nixon would have probably served out his term.

So what is editorializing? It's the injection of analysis and opinion into a reported piece. And editorializing is not de facto bad. Readers need it in stories where technical things have to be explained or the implications aren't clear. Science stories, in particular.

It is bad when someone uses editorializing to slant a narrative to suit a political or ideological agenda. Which brings me to reporting vs. commentary.

They are not the same thing. Journalism necessitates reporting, by definition. Op-eds sometimes incorporate reporting to make an argument and can have a journalistic function in that sense, but they are not, by definition, journalism.

Conflation of the two is a media illiteracy problem that is not just not just endemic to uneducated rubes, but also to wealthy tech investors who went to Harvard.