Bernard's recent post links to an article on conspiracy theorists, so I was primed when I read Nicholas Lemann's Paranoid Style in last week's NYer. [Surprisingly, it calls into question the rigor of several left-leaning documentaries about 9/11 and the war in Iraq.] It concludes:

It's a view of how the world works that mistakenly empowers particular, and evil, forces with the ability to determine the course of events, and it misses the messiness and contingency with which life actually unfolds. [...] One doesn't have to deny the horrors of the story to see it is not so neatly explicable. Tragedy is more profound if it is permitted to entail not just malignancy but also people screwing up.

And deeper in that issue, Robert Stone, discussing his career as a tabloid copywriter, has this to say:

By now, the readers (you, ladies and gentlemen, not the readers of the National Mirror) will have surmised that the great redeeming element in our work — what kept us on the right side of madness — was this: that, lousy as the world might be, things were not so awful that the lunatic nightmares we fashioned had any direct connection with reality, or, as it is sometimes called, the truth.

He then moves on to another tabloid...

[Inside News'] most distressing aspect from the staff perspective, was that some of the stories behind the headlines were more or less true; that is, events related to the ones in the stories had actually occurred somewhere in the world. The notion that what we were publishing reflected human behavior was disturbing.