Get it Right

To follow up on my post earlier this week about how I strive to be like a good journalist in my job, left unsaid but what I will say today is that there is so much bad journalism out there nowadays. Which is terrible news on so many levels.

I'm old enough to remember somewhat of a golden age in local journalism, in that pre-Internet the local rag had a monopoly on things like ads and classifieds, which supported good reporting and good writing. Fast forward to the present and it is a free for all as far as creation of and access to information, which represents progress but requires vigilance on the part of writers and readers, which all too often is in short supply. 

Honestly, and I say this warily because I know and respect so many good journalists out there so I'm trying not to smear the whole industry. But I'm enough in the know on some issues that I can read certain news stories and know that they are either incomplete or flat out wrong. And it's hard not to wonder if, on issues I don't know anything about, those stories are not quite right either.

But it's hard to fault writers for giving us readers what we want. And what we want, let's be candid, is not the truth but rather something that validates our particular point of view. Which we want to think is the truth but sometimes is not. And when we only take in that which supports our stance, rather than take the time to seek out whether there is more to the story, that tells me that we truly do not value the truth as much as our own feeling good.

This matters because this isn't just some intellectual exercise that we chatter about in our salons. It's real issues and real feelings and real actions and real consequences. I'm glad for my childhood background in debate, which forced me to learn both sides of an argument and therefore taught me to filter information accordingly. It's hard to put that filter to work. But it's oh so necessary if we're going to have the sort of honest and diverse discourse that our society demands. I am not optimistic about this.