One person’s climate change data is another person’s fake news. Lake Effect essayist and former journalist Avi Lank recently considered his relationship with truth:
Every day, for almost 40 years, I went into work, sat down at my desk and attempted to discover the truth. I was a newspaper reporter and that is what reporters do. I was determined that what appeared under my byline would be the truth, not just for people casually looking at it over their corn flakes the next morning, but also to help historians of the future understand the times in which I lived. But what is the truth? How did I know that what I wrote, and what my employer printed, was indeed true? I have been thinking hard about this recently, what with the fashion in some circles for alternative facts, whatever that means.
It turns out that I had several standards to determine whether what I was reporting actually reflected reality. First, I believed what I saw with my own eyes. If I went to a fire, saw flames shooting out, and was wearing a watch, I knew I was telling the truth if I said there was a blaze at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time. If I asked the fire chief how many people were fighting the blaze and if she knew of any injuries, I could report the answer as what she said, but I could be a bit less sure that it was true. And if I asked the chief what caused the fire, I could again report the response, but with the understanding that knowledge was limited at that point.
Still, for the most part, I and my readers could trust it was the best that could be known at the time. But when a story became more complicated, reporting the truth became infinitely more difficult. That was especially so if I was asked to check the truth of a claim.
As it is logically impossible to disprove anything, all I could do was try to see if what was claimed was true. The first step was asking the claimant to back up her statement.
A second was to check other sources with specialized knowledge in the area. And the interest of the claimant in having her story believed was also an important test of truth.
Take for example an investment company claiming that almost nobody was saving enough for retirement. If true, that was something that would increase the company’s business, giving it an obvious reason to trumpet flimsy facts. So in the end I needed to make a judgment. Was the claim probably true, possibly true or unverifiable? All a good reporter can do in the face of that situation is to report the claim in its appropriate context.
And then there are even harder claims to deal with, those based on faith that cannot be verified one way or another.
Every year I celebrate the liberation of the Jews from Egypt by the parting of the Red Sea. I believe this to be true, but cannot prove it with any hard evidence. It is instead a matter of faith. I feel the same way about reports that a person has “passed on” or “entered into eternal life” rather than just died. Perhaps the person’s essence has moved to a different place, but that cannot be proven. So it is, instead, a matter of faith. “Passed on” is fine language as an opinion in a paid obituary, but news articles should simply say the verifiable truth that a person has died.
A real problem for journalists is when a claim is made based on faith by somebody who really believes it to be true – a phenomenon that is on the rise recently.
See, for example, President Trump’s feelings about the results of the last election. He has faith that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hilary Clinton, even though there is no more proof for that than there is for the parting of the Red Sea. Journalists reporting Trump’s statement on the vote would do well to label it just that, a belief, as opposed to a fact – even an alternative one. Such labeling will keep journalism a pursuit of truth as well as help historians of the future to understand the times in which we live.
Essayist Avi Lank is a former reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel and later the Journal Sentinel. He’s also coauthor of the book, The Man Who Painted the Universe.
