At the dawn of the Donald Trump presidency, I remember the advice of the late journalist I.F. Stone: The best news comes from the bureaucrats nobody wants you to talk to.

This story illustrates that point.

During the latter stages of the Soviet Union, I met an anonymous British diplomat named Andrew Wood in Rome. He was posted there along with my cousin, who was a State Department political officer at the American embassy. They became friends, and I met Andrew at several so-cial events in my stay in Rome during a post-graduate journalism school trip through Europe.

Wood was warm and friendly. Over the years, my cousin would update me on how he had be-come a rising star in the British foreign service who reached the rank of ambassador.

That was 20 or so years ago. I thought nothing more of him. Until mid-January, when I read a news report in the online Daily Kos about a Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia involved in a subplot of the alleged Russian dossier on President Trump.

Sir Andrew was the one who met Sen. John McCain at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November and vouched for the author of the dossier, a former British intelligence of-ficer. Sir Andrew allegedly steered McCain to a copy of the report. McCain gave the report to the FBI. That Andrew Wood, I thought, practically falling off my couch.

I called my cousin, now retired and living in the Washington, D.C., area. Was it the same person? Yes, he confirmed. Well. That dossier, if proven true, could at the least stain the reputation of a president before he gets started.

Here are a few lessons learned for new and old media from that remarkable coincidence:

1. As Stone used to say, there’s not much news at a news conference. At these gab fests, you’re only hearing what the president, governor, mayor or tribal council chair wants you to hear.

2. Cultivate better sources. McCain trusted Sir Andrew. Those bureaucrats Stone talked about are out there. You might have to treat them anonymously, but verify and report.

3. Behind the rhetoric, watch how governments work. Remember how a bill becomes law, with behind-the-scenes deals, often but not always with compromise from all sides.

A few more things about I.F. Stone: He died in 1989, and with his “I.F. Stone’s Weekly” he was considered one of the great investigative journalists of all time. A few years after his death (con-veniently), he was accused by some conservatives of being a Soviet spy. American security ser-vices were silent on the matter: Stone had no secrets to share. But he did slice through dema-goguery, by going to original sources.

As a graduate journalism student a handful of years after newspapers took down a sitting presi-dent, I did a research paper on how daily newspapers gave witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy a pass. The right-wing Chicago Tribune? In the tank for McCarthy. The centrist New York Times? Slow to respond. Only Stone, who dug and questioned and didn’t show up at the McCarthy hearings, cut through the fog of overheated rhetoric.

When he shut down his weekly, Stone retired to a hideaway office in American University in Washington, writing about classical cultures. He called his wife and said he had a great morning: He wrote one-and-a-half pages. Happiness was good, he said, because then he could go dancing.

He recommended dancing, and maybe we’ll see more of it in the coming years. Journalists, and the rest of us, will have to dance through a lot of media clutter.

Arthur R. Henick, a writer from Chester, received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.