Can Artificial Intelligence Like IBM's Watson Do Investigative Journalism?

Media startup Vocativ identifies hot news stories by trawling the depth of the web, data-mining the vast seas of unindexed documents for information that might point to a story lead. Often journalists pair up with analysts, manually exploring data from different perspectives. The Associated Press’s Overview Project aims to build better visualization and analysis tools for investigative journalists to make sense of huge document sets. What if much of this could be automated? A cognitive computer, like IBM's Watson computer, could search reams of evidence, generate hypotheses, and collect supporting and/or contradicting evidence. Potential news stories would be presented to journalists and analysts who would weigh the evidence, assessing its accuracy, and decide which story ideas to pass on to an editor for further pursuit.