Truth, news, and news sources have been in the news a lot lately, including good articles written in this paper. What’s so contentious about the truth? Of course, the source. With so much information readily available to us today you would think knowing the truth about something would be simple. It’s not; it’s more complex and tougher to discern. There’s just too much information for the average human to sort through. It’s overwhelming.
We tend to go to so-called trusted sources, as we personally know or define them, albeit those sources can be suspect, especially if found on the Internet. Social media are easy draws, due in part to smart phones, since they mainly connect you with people you know or would like to know. Our friends and family, as much as we may adore them, may not be knowledgeable experts on a topic — especially Facebook “friends.”
With social media we have deviated from more reliable sources of information to more easily accessible, chummier sources, and to ground-swell movements of ideas and knowledge with questionable basis in fact.
In old school, especially in post-secondary school, we learned to check sources, do the research, which we did in libraries with books, journals, and papers, even the Encyclopedia Britannica (all now online). Our sources, sometimes presenting contrary opinions and findings, were deemed reliable because they carried the weight of credible, known authors and organizations, including libraries.
Newspapers and journals, many anyway, especially those available in libraries, were also deemed credible sources of information. Journalists are generally subject to a code and standard held by their paper, organization, and/or some governing authority that requires sticking to facts, or acknowledging when opinion rather than facts is being written. Good newspapers even use their code in their masthead, such as the New York Times’s, “All the news that’s fit to print,” to assure readers they only print credible news and worthy articles.
There’s an old, excellent report on a New York Sun reporter’s reply to a letter from an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon who wrote the Sun in 1897 asking if Santa Claus was real. She had asked her father and he said, "Write the paper, for if you see it in the Sun, it is so.” Reporter Francis Pharcellus Church wrote back a charming letter, published in the Sun, which said, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” OK, an anecdote that may defy fact, but here was a respected, articulate reporter and his respected newspaper adding their credentials to a revered notion.
Print media is disappearing into that vast, dense forest of electronic media, and with the change go the clearest sources of fact, verification, and choice.
Print cum electronic media is more abbreviated to catch the busily scanning eye and mind of the reader, who has much more choice. Environmentally preferable, perhaps, but it puts a heavier burden on us in discerning truth and good from an overwhelming array of information.
With our propensity to believe what we want even in the face of obvious, contrary facts, newspapers — especially local — and other old-fashioned, accessible print media are more effective challengers to our pre-conceived beliefs and ideas.
Roger Jackson is a former deputy minister and a St. Albert resident.
