There’s an old saying in reporting: “If your mother says she loves you, check it.” Apparently there’s also a codicil: “But if one of America’s most notorious spreaders of conspiracy theories and racist fantasies says his home was attacked by violent agitators, print it.” Why did Carlson’s exaggerations—if exaggerations is the right word—gain such instant credence? Carlson’s own lawyers have argued in court that he regularly speaks in ways that are “loose, figurative, or hyperbolic.” Carlson’s descriptions of events—including outright accusations of criminal conduct by named individuals “would not have been taken by reasonable listeners as factual pronouncements but simply as instances in which [people like Carlson] expressed their views over the air in the crude and hyperbolic manner that has, over the years, become their verbal stock in trade.” Yet when this flagrantly unreliable narrator narrated his own story, people across the media spectrum responded as if his personal narratives could be relied upon. Again, why?