Next week is for the Pledge Drive. Let me talk about it a little bit.
Half of Americans now get a lot of their news from social media. Most of that means that somebody, maybe an actual friend, maybe a social media “friend,” sent you something with a statement that some event took place and some things happened and other things may have been said about it. Most of that should be defined as rumors.
Stations like WAMC and the national services it uses, like National Public Radio, are the best antidote to being ruled by rumors. They are based on a journalistic model of fact checking. They want reporters to be there in person and record accurately. When they take statements, they look for people who are describing what they themselves saw and heard. They want corroboration – two or more people who saw and heard what happened reporting the same facts. They do their best to trace stories to their origins and to the actual witnesses. And they also look for people who may have seen and understood the events differently. That gives them the opportunity to dig in and try to find out why, and double check facts against available sources.
To preserve their own independence, journalists avoid activities that make them part of the story or part of any group or entity that is part of the story. I remember an editor of a paper a little outside our area who helped me write up a story but would not join our group because it would conflict with journalistic ethics. Of course they have views but they bend over backwards to get the other side and remain independent and as unbiased as they can. That’s part of the reason that commentators aren’t reporters and vice versa.
Lawyers call anything a person describes as hearsay unless they saw or heard it themselves. If you’ve ever played the telephone game where a secret is whispered to one person who repeats it to the next person and so on until it gets back to the original speaker who is then shocked – SHOCKED – by the story, you’ll understand why lawyers and journalists try to avoid such chains of garbled repetition. Norman Rockwell’s wonderful painting of The Gossips couldn’t be clearer.
Even witnesses who saw or heard something often get it wrong. As a result lawyers struggle to make sure that the witness actually could have seen or heard what they report. And they explore possible reasons for misunderstanding what happened. That’s part of what cross-examination is for.
Journalism has long been described as the first draft of history. Human beings make mistakes but journalists can and do reliably get the basic facts to us accurately – the who, what, when, where and how.
In this era when people are not only making mistakes, but getting the basic facts in reverse, it is particularly important to support accurate and reliable local and national journalism through pledging to WAMC, as my wife and I have been doing since we moved to Albany, some forty odd years ago.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.