How this is researched
Everything on this site is supposed to be checkable. This page says how, so you can tell when it has not been done well.
A search result is a lead, not a fact
Full-text search over historical newspapers and government documents runs on optical character recognition, and OCR is a search index rather than a transcript. It fails three ways. It produces visible nonsense, which is harmless because you can see it. It produces plausible wrong numerals — a scan that reads 1,540 where the page says 1,640 — which is not harmless, because there is no spell‑check for a number. And it omits: a term‑filtered search returns only the passages matching the query, so a paragraph nobody asked for never appears at all.
So every quotation, date, name and figure used here was read off the page image, not off the text layer. Where a document is reproduced on an episode page, the scan is there so you can read it yourself.
What counts as a document
In order of preference: court filings and dockets; federal reports, hearings and committee prints; contemporary newspapers; archival photographs held by the Library of Congress and the National Archives; maps and aerials. Illustration generated by software is used only where no record survives, is never made to resemble a document, a headline or a record, and never depicts a real identifiable person.
Copyright
Documents reproduced here are federal works, public records, or works whose copyright was never renewed and which are therefore in the public domain. Newspaper pages from 1931 to 1963 were published with a renewal requirement that most publishers never met; where a page from that window is shown, the renewal check was made in the Catalog of Copyright Entries and the result recorded either way. Contemporary material that is quoted under fair use in a video is cited here in text rather than reproduced as an image.
Living people
Where a living person is named in connection with a criminal case, the status of the accusation is stated plainly — charged, indicted, convicted, acquitted, dismissed. Home addresses of private citizens are not published here even when they appear in a public filing.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, the fastest place to say so is the comments on the episode's video, where it will be seen and can be fixed.