Be Careful What You Believe

Vindication can be sweet, but there's always a hint of sadness, I think. No matter how right we are, there is always that bittersweet feeling left between the two sides. The media  of course, has to be first with every story and sometimes doesn't get all the facts correct. One might think that people reading these "facts" would understand that there probably IS another side to any salacious story, but it surprises me how many people merely lap it up as gospel (which may or may not be exactly the truth, either!).
Case in point: serious abuse allegations leveled against a person in a position of authority. As the investigation continues, the accused is forbidden to respond in print or on television to these charges, and people are left to wonder about the real truth. Believing the news reports and affidavits from the accusers is a dangerous gambit since there is bound to be some "disremembering" that goes on, especially if the incident(s) in question happened several months ago.
Regrettably, sometimes those accusations are all too accurate, and an investigation corroborates the testimony. Fair enough. The guilty get punished (unless the guilty are Wall Street bankers laundering money).
However, if "the rest of the story" is not in line with the accusation, the accused is left with many people still holding the belief that there must have been something amiss...the old "where there's smoke, there's fire" theory; thus, exoneration is impossible because people chose to believe exactly what they read in the newspaper before all the facts came out.
It's a lose/lose: the accuser gets no satisfaction, and the accused is branded with and unfair "A" that no amount of "I told you so" can erase.
Sad.