Relations between event reports, explanations, and the reporter's own credibility and involvement, are studied as discursively handled matters. A series of newspaper reports and commentaries is examined, concerning the controversial abortion of one of a pair of healthy twin foetuses. For two weeks the newspapers reported events, discussed issues, corrected errors, quoted sources, and in various ways handled issues of fact and responsibility concerning those events, including their own reporting of them. The approach taken is to analyse fact and accountability as the business being handled and managed in the texts themselves, rather than issues that the analysis attempts to resolve. This enables a study of how various descriptive and accounting categories are selected and deployed, including the reliability of sources, actors' and informants' intentions and motives, narrative uses of tense, journalistic categories such as the distinction between 'news' and `features', and a wide variety of specific, rhetorically potent descriptions.