This may be a sticky topic, but I think if everyone just stays focused and calm, we can have a really productive talk.
Preface: I am NOT referring to any particular person, course, incident, or anything else...I just want to see what answers we as an intelligent body politic protecting and preserving great architectural tenets and histories might formulate.
How do we know - decades later - what old newspaper accounts to trust and which ones to discard? Newspapers are usually secondary sources, not primary sources. Someone else is reporting what they heard or saw, usually what they were told by people they interviewed and research they conducted. But newspapers screw things up all the time.
Example: today two separate newspapers made a pretty big mistake. They said Spain went through the entire World Cup tournament winning every game after Switzerland 1-0. But that's just flat out wrong. They won the knockout stages 1-0, but they beat Honduras 2-0 and Chile 2-1. I had to correct two guys around the water cooler today. They said, "well the paper said it. how would they get it wrong?" So I pulled up the scores and they said, "well how about that."
Another example: in one of my recent cases, we had three people testify about what person x said. All three were standing right there listening to his story, and their responses were no more than 10 minutes after person X spoke.
Two listeners told one story, but the third person said something completely different, something so far out of line from what person x said it was hard to believe he had been right there listening.
In a second, different portion of the testimony one man testified, "I smelled alcohol on person z's breath." Well three people got up and testified that was impossible. They were out to dinner with the man ten minutes before, and no one had a drink. He then drove to that house of the person testifying, arriving maybe ten minutes after he left. He swears up and down he didn't stop on the way and the timetable backs him up; he had no time to stop off for a quick one. Yet the man testifying was adamant..."his breath smelled like a brewery." The man in question never drinks beer. he drinks only whiskey...he's known for it. Yet the lugnut on the stand persisted.
People see, hear, and report vastly different things even though they saw exactly the same event.
So...how do we know which old news articles are reliable? How do we know the author wasn't some idiot who had no clue what he was doing and made some ghastly error that we - decades or even a century later - can't divine with certainty? Remember the "did Tillie design Bethpage" controversy? Or the Billy Bell and son issue at Torrey causing confusion because the firm was credited, even though the father died? Or any of the others where we have just some news account to go by?
I try to stick to primary sources. My sources for the Pebble Open this year were an old Tom Watson interview from 1982 that he wrote, and a piece by Herbert Warren Wind that is, sadly, out of print. But even trusting Wind as I do, I was still scared even he might have made some terrible gaffe that we didn't discover till later and that I would repeat it unwittingly.
What guidelines are good to use when analyzing the reliability of an ancient source?
While we are at it, isn't it possible that several people wrote under the Far and Sure nom de plume or other pen names of the day? Perhaps that might explain why the style and content differ?