Unambiguity is an asset which promotes the selection of a news story. This
has two repercussions on editing. Firstly, unambiguous, clearcut stories are
less liable to be badly edited. If a story is ambiguous, complicated, diverse, it
is more likely to suffer, as did the complex, updating wires on the Brazil
floods. And second, copy editors are likely to commit inaccuracies in the
process of making complicated stories less ambiguous. Maybe's become
certainties (29, 30), open sets are closed (28). Attribution deletion is the
classic case, since acknowledging a viewpoint, and particularly conflicting
viewpoints, necessarily makes a story ambiguous (33, 34).