University of California Press, 2007), 76.23 23 Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995), 10–22, 51–52.
24 24 The Pulitzer Prizes, https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1946, accessed Nov. 2, 2020.
25 25 Patrick Reusse, “Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman dies at age 100,” The Star Tribune, Oct. 19, 2020.
26 26 NBA.com, “Sid Hartman and the Minneapolis Lakers,” June 20, 2011. Accessed on Nov. 2, 2020, at: https://www.nba.com/lakers/news/110228sidhartman.html.
27 27 Steven K. Knowlton and Patrick Parsons, The Journalist’s Moral Compass (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 207–208.
28 28 Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 20–30.
29 29 George Sokolsky, “Dumb professors,” essay included in a collection of reaction to the Hutchins Report, Nieman Reports, July 1947, 18.
30 30 Charlene J. Brown, Trevor R. Brown, and William L. Rivers, The Media and the People (Huntington, NY: R. E. Krieger, 1978), 178.
31 31 A. David Gordon and John Michael Kittross, Controversies in Media Ethics, 2nd edn. (New York: Longman, 1999), 97.
32 32 Frederick S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
33 33 Karen Schneider and Marc Gunther, “Those news-room ethics codes,” Columbia Journalism Review, July–Aug. 1985. Through his work in the Associated Press Managing Editors, Gene Foreman also observed the exponential growth of newsroom codes in the 1970s and 1980s.
34 34 Michael Josephson, Making Ethical Decisions (Los Angeles: Josephson Institute, 2002), 29.
35 35 Mark A. Nelson, “Newspaper ethics code and the NLRB,” Freedom of Information Center Report No. 353, Columbia, MO.
36 36 George N. Gill, “It’s your move, publishers,” Quill, Aug. 1973.
37 37 Poorman was quoted in “Junketing journalists,” Time, Jan. 28, 1974.
38 38 Schneider and Gunther, “Those newsroom ethics codes”.
39 39 Gene Foreman is indebted to the following for their insights into the reasons for increased ethical awareness: John Carroll, Bob Giles, Bill Marimow, Jim Naughton, Mike Pride, Steve Seplow, and Bob Steele.
40 40 Roy Peter Clark, “Red light, green light: a plea for balance in media ethics,” Poynter, May 17, 2005.
41 41 Alicia C. Shepard, “To err is human, to correct divine,” American Journalism Review, June 1998.
42 42 Wilbert E. Moore, “Is journalism a profession?” in The Professions: Roles and Rules (New York: Russell Sage, 1970), 4–22.
43 43 Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver, The American Journalist in the Digital Age: Key Findings (Bloomington: School of Journalism, Indiana University, 2014), 9. The findings come from online interviews conducted Aug. 7–Dec. 20, 2013, with 1,080 US journalists working in print, broadcast, and online media.
Point of View
The Essential Pursuit of Truth
Truth … is not a matter of who wields power or who speaks loudest.
By Martin Baron
AS A PROFESSION, we maintain there is such a thing as fact, there is such a thing as truth.
Truth, we know, is not a matter of who wields power or who speaks loudest. It has nothing to do with who benefits or what is most popular. And ever since the Enlightenment, modern society has rejected the idea that truth derives from any single authority on Earth.
“Gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts.”
To determine what is factual and true, we rely on certain building blocks. Start with education. Then there is expertise. And experience. And, above all, we rely on evidence.
We see that acutely now when people’s health can be jeopardized by false claims, wishful thinking and invented realities. The public’s safety requires the honest truth.
Yet education, expertise, experience, and evidence are being devalued, dismissed and denied. The goal is clear: to undermine the very idea of objective fact, all in pursuit of political gain.
Along with that is a systematic effort to disqualify traditional independent arbiters of fact.
The press tops the list of targets. But others populate the list, too: courts, historians, even scientists and medical professionals – subject-matter experts of every type.
And so today the government’s leading scientists find their motives questioned, their qualifications mocked – despite a lifetime of dedication and achievement that has made us all safer.
In any democracy, we want vigorous debate about our challenges and the correct policies. But what becomes of democracy if we cannot agree on a common set of facts, if we can’t agree on what even constitutes a fact?
Are we headed for extreme tribalism, believing only what our ideological soulmates say? Or do we become so cynical that we think everyone always lies for selfish reasons? Or so nihilistic that we conclude no one can ever really know what is true or false; so, no use trying to find out?
Regardless, we risk entering dangerous territory. Hannah Arendt, in 1951, wrote of this in her first major work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” There, she observed “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts … that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and may become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition.”
One hundred years ago – in 1920 – a renowned journalist and leading thinker, Walter Lippmann, harbored similar worries. Lippmann warned of a society where people “cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions … what somebody asserts, not what actually is.” Lippmann wrote those words because of concerns about the press itself. He saw our defects and hoped we might fix them, thus improving how information got to the public.
Ours is a profession that still has many flaws. We make mistakes of fact, and we make mistakes of judgment. We are at times overly impressed with what we know when much remains for us to learn.
In making mistakes, we are like people in every other profession. And we, too, must be held accountable.
What frequently gets lost, though, is the contribution of a free and independent press to our
