When I was a cub reporter in Los Angeles, covering crime for the now-deceased Los Angeles Herald Examiner, we used to joke that we should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. It was a horrendous paper — don’t ask me what I was doing there other than booking a paycheck. My late editor, Don Forst, used to tell me that if I wanted truth, I should be novelist. But I was in newspapers, which meant I did whatever was necessary to sell papers, fighting every minute to try to find a way to tell the truth in the face of a phalanx of editors who knew how to sensationalize no matter what the story.