Truth and Journalism

       

“News and truth are not the same thing […] The function of news is to signalize an event. The function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other. And make a picture of reality upon which men can act” (Lippman, Walter, Kovach & Rosenstiel, 39). This is the third quote on the handout we were given in class from the group who presented, and I strongly agree with it. We as journalists report the news: what is happening in the world and who is involved. We are expected to be truthful in our reporting. However, when we write a story on an event, we can only tell what we know. If a journalist does not know the truth about something that happened, he or she cannot be blamed for not reporting it. For example, in the group activity we did in class, we were each given a different amount of the story about the stolen painting from the MOA. My group had four out of the five parts of the story, so we wrote an article about the facts we were given, and to us, it seemed that we had the truth. The fifth part of the story that we did not have, but later found out, was that the MOA director had stolen the painting. In reality, he was the criminal, but to our group, with the facts we were given, we were telling the truth. The truth to us was not the absolute truth in the event.

                We discussed in class how a journalist can know when he or she has received enough of the truth to report it. Someone asked whether a journalist should wait to write a story until absolutely everything about the event was known. I think that for many stories, the absolute, complete truth will never be known, or will take months or years to know, so we must do the best we can with the information we have researched and discovered. For example, if someone is murdered, the story should be reported, because it is newsworthy. Right after a murder happens, it is rarely known who the murderer was, but if the journalist does not know the truth of who was involved, he or she should still write a story about the murder itself, and tell whatever facts are known at that time.

                We also discussed the relationship between facts and context in class. I think that if you only tell the straight facts, you’re not telling the complete story. You must put the facts into context so readers will be able to know everything that is going on and make their own inferences about the situation. The purposes of reporting the news is to let people know what is going on in the world. The first quote on the handout we were given says that talk radio is just an affirmation of the “preconceptions of the audience.” I believe that is true to some degree, which is why journalists must report the events of the world without a bias or opinion. The general public should make their own decisions and interpretations of what they hear in the news, and they will only be able to do that if we as journalists tell them the truth.