Recognising Manufactured or Staged Evidence
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Not every document or photograph presented as evidence was created honestly at the time it claims to have been made, since some are staged deliberately for effect, others altered after the fact, and a careful researcher learns early to ask basic questions about internal consistency before accepting any single item at face value.
Warning signs worth watching for include details that do not quite match their surrounding context, a source that surfaces conveniently at exactly the right moment for a particular story, or a provenance that cannot be traced through any independent institutional path back to its claimed point of origin.
None of this means treating every source with blanket suspicion, which would make research practically impossible to conduct at all, it means applying the same steady scrutiny consistently, regardless of how neatly a piece of evidence happens to fit the story a writer already hoped to tell before the research began.