News is a moving target. As any wire service reporter can tell you, he who hesitates is lost.

At the same time, developing a healthy, if not borderline paranoid, sense of skepticism is essential to maintaining credibility at any news organization.

Which is why so many phrases we think of as ‘newsy' have entered the realm of the cliché: ‘is believed to have …' (connections in the underworld, a conflict of interest), ‘the alleged victim …' (of a firebug tram driver, of a man not yet convicted of fraud), ‘are said to be …' (unprepared, unlicensed, unprofessional).

It isn't that every newspaper reporter and editor wants to sound like Walter Cronkite. The reason these phrases turn up like mushrooms after the rain is that they give journalists a measure of hedging just in case they've been given a bum steer.

That kind of caution is one of the most important skills a reporter or editor can have, and it can't be taught in journalism school. The only way to learn it, and remember it for life, is to fall prey to such a misleading lead - or to draw a conclusion that seems perfectly obvious from a set of facts that, as it turns out, are not quite as obvious as they appear.

Take the Internet. A generation is now growing up that makes little, if any, distinction between a news story found on the BBC and one found on a film fan Web site.

That's a dangerous state of affairs. News organizations are far from perfect, or they wouldn't need hedging language. But they do vigorously question everyone and everything that comes their way, one would hope, and, despite deadlines, they double- and triple-check their facts.

It seems a fair bet that many eager young reporters around the globe are smarting this week from such an object lesson. Web page reports, some of which sounded quite convincing and which quoted a press release from Warner Bros., offered a great story to the world June 20: The parents of Daniel Radcliffe, the beloved young actor who plays Harry Potter, were so aghast at Prague's reputation for sex and vice that they forbade him to shoot the fifth installment in the hit franchise here. This, despite the aforementioned press release from Warner, indicating that they would shoot in Prague.
You can just about hear the hands of news editors everywhere rubbing together gleefully at such a story - it has everything, after all. Sex, a hit movie, a star, scandal, an embarrassing reversal, a family spat, even an international incident (albeit a fairly minor one).

Just one problem: The parents, Alan Radcliffe and Marcia Gresham, never said any such thing. Oh, and Warner never made any such release.

Both parties, fortunately, came forward quickly to dispel the story - but not before it got in a few respected mainstream news publications, such as Bill Zwecker's entertainment column in the Chicago Sun-Times (Don't feel too bad, Mladá fronta Dnes - you're in good company with a WBBM commentator).

The movie biz, like many industries, is noted for secrecy and cloak-and-dagger negotiations, but adds the element of verbal deals to the mix. It's not like crime or government reporting, where there's a written record to refer to, and depends on the contacts and relationships of a reporter with his or her sources - and, as much as anything else, on a thorough sense of skepticism.

With a state of play like that, it's probably best to take a double shot of the latter when reading breaking movie star scoops. Besides, we are in Sin City, right?