As a proud hack, I also resemble these remarks (via Running Dog):

The State Council News Office head, Zhao Qizheng, recently accused certain foreign journalists of coming to their conclusions and then finding the facts that fit them, usually to the disadvantage and disrepute of the Chinese Communist Party. As foreign journalists, Running Dog admits that he is absolutely right.
Information is at a premium. Access is often impossible. We rely on the snippets of news that we have managed to obtain on previous occasions and are forced to build on that. As a result, we come out with elaborate structures of supposition and rumour.
As journalists, we can only aspire to be more or less accurate, and to revise that scale upwards to the greatest extent possible. It is easy to misunderstand, or to base our case on partial evidence, or to be steered in what particular direction by those who form the basis of our source materials.
These source materials aren’t just the obvious papers and press releases and official speeches, but also the array of assumptions we bring to the job – which may include the usually paranoid assumption that everything everyone tells us is fake.