As a much younger man, your gray-haired editor learned the old-fashioned rules of reporting from men and women who were gray-haired themselves. The point is, the rules are long-standing.
But they were not always around. Newspapers in the Early Republic, during Jefferson’s time, were pointedly partisan in their political views and saw their job as advocacy for their side and defamation of their opponents. Untrue, vicious slanders were published and the victims were often powerless to protect their reputations. After the notorious “Yellow Journalism” period around the turn of the 20th century, when William Randolph Hearst’s many publications were accused of fomenting the Spanish-American War with dubious reports, the public wanted news they could trust. The “industry” had to shape up and show integrity and commitment to truth and fairness. And thus, standards of objectivity and evenhandedness were promulgated.
We see that wrong way repeating itself now. The nation’s major newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal—have drifted away from standards of objectivity and can be fairly accused of pushing agendas rather than presenting a complete set of facts and dispassionate explanations of events. Whenever you see a phrase like “senior administration officials,” or “persons familiar with the situation,” or “insiders tell us,” etc., it’s time to stop reading. You are being propagandized at the least, or, more likely, intentionally deceived.
This is the Gazette’s basic rule: all information has to have its sources revealed. NO anonymous sources.
A proper newspaper story is “repeatable” in the same sense that a science experiment is. A different person pursuing the same topic should be able to produce the same set of facts and, in a sense, the same outcome. By that I mean that a reader should be able to call every source named in the story and ask, “Did you really say this?” Or, “Did the story fairly reflect what you said in the interview and what your point of view is?” Or, “Was anything important left out?” Thus, a reader can hold a reporter accountable. That’s how trust grows.
The Gazette is often approached and asked to investigate situations in which the caller feels vulnerable to retaliation and prefers to hide. “Please get this out but don’t tell anyone I told you about it.” This is often true with stories about local schools. The Gazette learns many things that we believe to be credible, but the sources are scared. That information is not published. If a source who has certain knowledge of a fact won’t put their name behind their statement, the Gazette won’t put its name on it either.
National journalism’s apparently conscious decision into make advocacy rather than truth the point is costing them the public’s trust. When was the last time you lost trust in a person, or a news source, and then decided to trust them again? Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. If you do go back to them, then it’s more like Ronald Reagan’s adage, “Trust, but verify.” A repeat violation of trust is a coup de gras. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” For the most part, once trust is lost, it’s not found.
We like it that the standard is high. Of course we make mistakes, but we try to prevent them to save ourselves from public embarrassment. And when we do get something wrong, we try to own up and correct it promptly. The Gazette has published more than 200 issues so far and not one of them is without an error that jumped off the page at us, but only after it was put in print and out on the street. As a wise man once said, “God teaches us humility by humiliating us.”
The Gazette is a small-town paper with a limited advertising base. Offending even a few of our supporters by being dishonest about some subject would mean our demise. Probably in short order. We are therefore socially and economically constrained, almost policed, in ways the big news sources are not. Our future as your newspaper—and more broadly, our future as American society—requires us to be personally committed to truth and fairness in practice.
