CQ 'refute'

As part of our once-a-year effort to say something nice about Fox News -- hey, how about the copy editor who correctly stetted "refute" in the nut graf (above) of this WSJ pickup:

As a presidential candidate in August 2015, Donald Trump huddled with a longtime friend, media executive David Pecker, in his cluttered 26th floor Trump Tower office and made a request.

What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting.

... The Trump Tower meeting and its aftermath are among several previously unreported instances in which Mr. Trump intervened directly to suppress stories about his alleged sexual encounters with women, according to interviews with three dozen people who have direct knowledge of the events or who have been briefed on them, as well as court papers, corporate records and other documents.

Taken together, the accounts refute a two-year pattern of denials by Mr. Trump, his legal team and his advisers that he was involved in payoffs to Ms. McDougal and a former adult-film star. They also raise the possibility that the president of the United States violated federal campaign-finance laws.

Even hard-core prescriptivists should probably admit by now that the refute/rebut distinction is slowly sinking beneath the waves -- though it's still fun to  catalog the occasional case where "refute" is more about ideology than carelessness. Here, too, it's nice to think that someone knew exactly what they were doing.

And good for the occasionally toothy Journal, too.  Hope everybody at least gets a window seat on Mr. Murdoch's unheated cattle train to Siberia.