You know they do things differently in America. Back in 2004 the famous newscaster Dan Rather and his producer were accused of using unverifiable documents as the basis for a story alleging that US president George Bush had dodged the draft and used family influence both to get into the Texas National Guard and to whitewash his record afterwards, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
The inquiry that followed was headed by a former attorney general and Pennsylvania governor, Richard Thornburgh, and by Louis Boccardi, a former chief of Associated Press - in other words, some seriously big guns.
Despite these big guns, though, in September of this year Rather started suing his former employers, the television network CBS, for $70 million (€47.2 million). In court his lawyers seem to imply, among other things, that CBS was out to get Rather. Last Thursday CBS strenuously denied this and asked for the case to be dismissed.
Of course the Rather case, from the start, has been played out on a very big stage indeed. CBS fired Rather on November 3rd, 2004, the day after Bush was re-elected for a second term as president. Could this have been a coincidence? Rather doesn't think so. The thrust of his argument seems to be that CBS dumped him to curry favour with the White House; that it never investigated the story thoroughly once doubt had been cast upon it.
His opponents are convinced that the unverifiable documents were in fact forged. They also think that, at 75, Rather is a bit past it in the macho world of television news, an egomaniac after too many years as an anchorman and, worse still, a sore loser.
Television is a series of lies but even the modern audience - make that particularly the modern audience - expects the bits of television that claim to be true to actually be true. It's just the way we were brought up. We believe in television. We want our documentaries - and the documentary is a notoriously slippy form - to be true.
In the past week alone, as well as CBS moving to have Rather's case against it dismissed, we have had the West Midlands Police in Britain bringing a complaint against a Channel 4 documentary on radical Islam.
The West Midlands Police complained, among other things, that the programme had been edited in a biased, not to say dishonest, way which could ultimately have stirred up racial hatred. Their complaint was not successful.
On Monday it was claimed that Griff Rhys Jones had not actually climbed Ben Nevis in his BBC series Mountain (Rhys Jones was unavailable for comment).
And all week, of course, we have had the fascinating case here of Justine Delaney-Wilson and the cocaine-snorting Minister (allegedly). Delaney-Wilson is said to be on holiday in New Zealand, presumably hotly pursued by some of this country's press.
In the past, with a less aggressive print media, you can be pretty sure that there were just as many fudged competitions, fake viewers' letters and stories based on unverifiable documents, but back then none of the rest of us knew. Although it is hard to think of a time when a Minister of our Government could have been publicly accused of taking narcotic drugs without it rippling the waters of public calm just a tad.
But the point is that the television audience has become so well informed about the medium that 12-year-old children can discuss commissioning editors, production companies and contemporaneous notes while devouring a hamburger and maintaining a vice-like grip on the remote. It took me years to learn that stuff.
There are those who would argue that when you make television news become show business, you're going to end up in a lot of trouble.
You could say - and this is not meant facetiously - that the lines between fact and fiction started to blur the day some bright spark started to put the Miami Vice music with documentary shots of quite ordinary European city streets. Suddenly the people who were making television were revealed to have been watching too much television themselves.
They thought that they were in Lou Grant, whereas they were actually in Drop The Dead Donkey - a far more accurate reflection, my sources tell me, of what it's like to work in television news.
Truth used to be stranger than fiction, now it is fiction. When a news story comes along that sounds like the plot-line - in fact several plot-lines - of that excellent series, The Sopranos, the questions don't come thick and fast - they don't come at all.
That Liam Lawlor died in a car with a whore was a great ending to what the newspapers had been pleased to call a colourful life. However, Liam Lawlor did not die in a car with a whore.
Television viewers know that David Chase sat down and wrote The Sopranos. We know that he made it up, and he did a great job. That doesn't mean that we want our news, either on television or in newspapers, to be the same.