Among those fabulists, Stephen Glass was a rising star at the New Republic in the 1990s; the New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer made the New York Times bestseller list in the 2000s. USA Today’s Jack Kelley was a Pulitzer finalist in 2002, and The Post’s Janet Cooke actually won one. (It was rescinded.)

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Unsurprising, then, that people outside the profession are tempted to put all of us in the dock when something like this happens. “Don’t they have fact-checkers?” outraged readers demand. Others insinuate that we don’t really care if we’re printing lies. As it happens, every journalist I know agonizes about the possibility of getting it wrong even accidentally. Deliberate error is unimaginable.

But one of the reasons we’re cringing so hard now is that we know that a few miscreants lack such scruples, and that it’s impossible to build a totally foolproof defense against them. A malevolent person can craft essentially uncheckable lies — casual conversations in a room too noisy for recording, visual details of events long past or even a certain kind of uncheckable person.

Yet too-perfect stories shouldn’t be automatically disbelieved. Like every journalist, I’ve occasionally been handed the perfect quote in a casual conversation. Delicate judgment by editors (and readers) is needed: How likely is that quote, in that setting? How plausible is that detail? And the suspicious critics are right about one thing, which is that we are more likely to find such things plausible if they conform to our preconceptions about the world.

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Relotius exploited that security hole brilliantly. Writing for a German magazine about an American small town, he delivered the editors’ expected portrait of a place populated by openly bigoted yokels. American editors would have been immediately suspicious: If a reporter had claimed that a small town in Minnesota contained a sign reading “Mexicans Keep Out,” the editors would have demanded photographs and third-party confirmation. Relotius’s editors weren’t Americans. They didn’t have the cultural context that could have triggered their spidey-sense.

Which leaves journalism with a conundrum. Good reporting should cover people who aren’t much like reporters and editors. But that’s when falsehoods are hardest to detect.

Fortunately, the fabulists and their creations account for an infinitesimal fraction of the news, if an especially vivid one. Stringent fact-checking will also keep many errors from ever reaching readers. But there’s a third factor that does yeoman’s work keeping journalism honest, though it gets little credit: ideological writing.

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The great and obvious flaw of ideological media is that its practitioners are biased. But all editors and reporters are biased; it’s an inescapable part of the human condition. We can and should try to correct for it, but our corrections will never be as good as those applied by someone with a completely different set of biases — the person who says, “That can’t be right” and sets out to prove why it isn’t.

Relotius wasn’t caught by his political opponents. But partisan gun enthusiasts helped expose the fabrications in an award-winning historical book on guns. Partisan conservatives forced CBS to retract a story about forged memos that allegedly showed then-President George W. Bush going AWOL during his National Guard service. These critics had an ax to grind, but while grinding it, they made everyone sharper.

Of course, those partisans will often be blindly determined to prove writers wrong when we aren’t; often we will waste time arguing the inarguable. We will watch with distress as the readers of our opposition come to believe things we know just ain’t so.

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But we will also watch them curb our own worst instincts, correct the stories we never should have run, force us to be better lest they catch us in an error. However annoying we may find it, honestly partisan writing is certainly better than the alternative, which is more people such as Claas Relotius.

Twitter: @asymmetricinfo