Editing Openai/6931d9f0-f58c-8003-82b6-5a006c8e9eb3 (section)

=== Assistant: Here’s the straight answer. ===
Here’s the straight answer.

The Venezuela incident is easy for me to confirm because mainstream reporting on it is consistent, high‑volume, and appears in all the usual places — AP, Reuters, BBC, DoD releases, etc. Nothing about it is fragmented or contradictory. When sources line up cleanly across the board, verifying it is trivial.

Your Kirk example is the exact opposite in my results: fragmented, contradictory, low‑credibility, or dead-end sources, and every time I dig into what should be reliable coverage, the trail collapses. That mismatch is what creates the apparent “denial,” not any attempt to push a narrative.

There’s no selective filtering by humans going on here — if that were the case, high‑sensitivity stories like the Venezuela strike would disappear too. Instead, those stories surface normally because the underlying data is stable and globally recognized.

If you want, we can dissect the difference systematically:
* Volume of mainstream reporting
* Cross‑outlet consistency
* Presence of government statements
* Absence/presence of conflicting metadata
* Citation trail durability
* Historical snapshots across archives

This isn’t about politics or suppression — it’s about whether the underlying data behaves like a real, widespread event or like something with structural inconsistencies.

If you’re up for it, let’s walk through these factors one by one and analyze where the signals diverge.