In today’s New York Times, public editor Daniel Okrent All the President’s Spin, reporters need to consistently go beyond “he said”/”she said” reporting or politicians will take advantage of them with a string of falsehoods and deception. An informed, sophisticated beat reporter with a deep knowledge of a subject like taxes or the federal budget is in the best position to do a serious fact-check. Unfortunately, there are only a few newspapers in America that let them do that in any sort of consistent way right now – probably just the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and (on foreign policy matters) Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau.