What’s important for journalism is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality.
    — Bill Moyers, in Moyers on America

    People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.
    — Tom Stoppard, in Night and Day

Much of the talk around me, here as elsewhere, concerns the truth about what’s really going on, mostly in the form of contemptuous remarks that somebody else, someone who’s just been speaking, doesn’t have a handle on that.  I’m here to tell you that you are perfectly correct.

Notice, the next time you are actually there at some event that comes to the attention of the news people.  Notice what you saw happening, and then compare it to the account of it, the raw, first-hand account from a reporter at the scene or at least who investigated the scene still fresh.  That’s the account that will go out on the wires, as they say, though wires have less and less to do with that, now.

They get it wrong.  They place a large emphasis on some facet of the event which, to you, was totally a side issue, and not what the event was actually about.  Or they skimp the actual event because they have an ax to grind, a larger issue that this little occurrence can be used to bolster or disprove.  Or they get some figure wrong, or misattribute some action to the wrong person.

It’s happened to me several times, and they never have it right. Sometimes they’re off by a little, and sometimes they are completely off the mark.  Other eyewitnesses make the same sorts of errors, and I can only figure I am doing the same thing myself.

Then the wire story is picked up and becomes grist in the larger mills, because the news is there to serve politics.  The point of journalism is to inform the citizen, and the point of the citizen is political.  So nobody can actually have any sort of clear idea about the truth about what’s really going on.  Flawed as house apes are in our memory and our perception, colored as all of it is by apperceptions and prejudgments, the most valuable kind of report, even for political purposes, is still the first-hand one, especially by the actors in the scene themselves.  The best thing is to hear it from someone who can say, “I did this because I wanted to have that effect.”

The first exposure we usually have to these reports is within some political discussion, third-hand at best.  But the fact is, most news is only valuable in that context, as an aid to our judgment.  We have to generalize; that’s what it’s all for.

So that’s the caveat. Doubt what you hear, just a little, because some of it really didn’t happen the way you are hearing it.  And hone your judgment.  Doubt is the key.  Scientific method is structured by skepticism for a reason.