Jefferson Review

	Jefferson Review
	"Your Liberty is Our Interest"	December 24, 2001
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Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil
Gordon Francis Corbett

    Thanks partly to old movies, some people think that every reporter has "who, what, where, when, why, and how" engraved on his soul. They think that to keep his job, a reporter needs only to search hard and to write well.

    Unfortunately, a reporter is an employee. To stay employed, he must satisfy his editor and his publisher. He is not like the fictional reporters we know from those old black-and-white movies.

    Remember them? An old-movie reporter steps into a telephone booth, shoves his hat back on his head, picks up the telephone's receiver, and dials a number. He leans toward the microphone and says, "Give me the city desk. I've got a story that will crack this town wide open."

    In real life, a publisher might not want his town, or his country, cracked wide open. So, when a reporter turns in a story giving the low-down on the highers-up, his publisher may reject it and warn him to keep quiet. As he likes working, he does just that.

    This aspect of journalism rarely sees either film or print, and unless we keep it in mind, we can never understand why companies spend serious money to show us what we see or read.

    Today, straight reporting is passé. Journalism professors teach "models" that define what makes stories "good." Their graduates' work fills our newspapers and our television screens.

    Fortunately, thanks partly to the Internet, their monopoly is gone.

    Those old films told us that bad reporters lie, but that a good reporter "tells the truth and shames the Devil." Discerning the difference is our job. When we compare reports from the several sources available, we will see who gives us lies and who gives us facts. Armed with that truth, we may yet save our freedom.

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