Let me be the one quadrillionth person to say how terrific Alexandra Polier’s story is. She’s the woman who was wrongly accused of having had an affair with John Kerry, and her story provides a fantastic look at how rumors and spin get turned into hard news in politics. After reading the piece, I feel like the “reporting” being done by all involved was a bit like the friend-of-a-friend thing, each level adding a small detail to the story that he or she thought would make it more palatable to the public, and never caring much that the small detail was invariably false. In the end, Polier played things perfectly by refusing to provide more grist for the mill (and being in Nairobi, inaccessible to a lot of the hungry carnivores!).