OPINION: Truth and trust and the symbiotic relationship of the press and the people
Written by Dallas Hyland
In 2004, the journalism community lost one of its greatest assets when Gary Webb shot himself in the head.
Gary who?
Yeah, I said that too at first and was as disconcerted as I could be when I learned that his work in exposing the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking in the United States was, some believe, largely the impetus behind his eight year demise following a series known as “Dark Alliance.”
Jonathan Krim, the Mercury News editor who recruited Webb had perhaps the most accurate take on the late reporter. And perhaps the most brutally honest.
“[Webb] had all the qualities you’d want in a reporter: curious, dogged, a very high sense of wanting to expose wrongdoing and to hold private and public officials accountable,” Krim said. “The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred.”
Webb’s first editor at the Mercury News said of him: “Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. Few reporters I’ve known could match his nose for an investigative story. When he was engaged, he worked hard. He wrote well. But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. When facts didn’t fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines.”
I have often lamented that there will come a day when I will be perhaps speaking to a group of aspiring journalists, perhaps from the vantage of a teacher, and I will tell them something I have found to be quite true in the business of reporting.
If you are on a story, and someone offers you information you did not ask for or inquire about and your ears do not get warm, then you need to stay with things like feature writing, because you are not a reporter.
Nothing wrong with taking an honest allocation of your own skill set and abilities and applying them honestly.
But say you do have a well-calibrated bullshit meter. Say you do find yourself compelled with a righteous indignation to take seriously the charge of serving the interest of the reader by exposing the wrong doings of our people in position of self-imposed impunity.
You are going to make mistakes. And when you do, you are going to be crucified. It’s the nature of the business.
I do not know what Webb’s response to this was, but I gather his firm convictions often led to some heated conversations in the editors’ muster.
Those who know what that muster is and have suffered a fact check of their own work can certainly attest to what it is to have hours of your work scrutinized and eventually published, only to have some couch-surfing, comment-section troll tell you your work sucks and you are a hack.
But I digress here.
Last week, for the first time in almost five years on the job at The Independent, I printed my first correction.
I reported on the recent stepping down of Dixie State University’s Vice President Bill Christensen. I had interviewed several people at the college—all of whom demanded to have their names withheld out of fear of retaliation—who said that he was in essence asked to step down. I read and re-read the April 16 minutes from the Faculty Senate meeting where this issue was determined, and I noted that same fear of retaliation in the fact that the names were redacted and that several times in the meeting, people made clear their fear. A vote was eventually taken to determine whether to move forward with a vote of no confidence or to write a letter addressing the concerns. The outcome of the vote was for the letter. I reported that a preliminary “vote of no confidence” had been taken and that a letter was opted for.
The semantics of this caught the eye of a reader, and a lengthy discussion ensued. The statement, while in essence true, omitted a clarification and was unintentionally misleading. But misleading nonetheless.
There is simply no denying that Christensen’s resignation was likely less his idea as it was those who worked with him. And the comments on my article were the usual mix of shoot the messenger versus hail the messenger.
But the importance of the message was what was on the mind of this reader, and frankly, I commend her. She made a solid case, and in the end, I was forced to do two things: consider the possibility that I had made an error and print a correction, and come face to face with what kind of journalist I was and would continue to be.
I am dogged. I have fierce convictions about the necessity in the fabric of our constitution as a people for there to be a relentless and fearless press. But I was happy to learn of myself that when I say I speak for the reader, I not only mean it, I believe it. And when a reader, equally as passionate about their convictions for the need of this press says, “You’ve got to get this right, it matters,” I not only listen, I engage.
Because it does matter.
In this transitional time where traditional newspapers are either dropping like flies or printing advertorials and unsourced opinions, it matters.
In this period where the well-calibrated bullshit meter and guts to go with instinct are the qualities less desired in a reporter than their ability to manage search engine optimization, it matters.
It matters, because as attorney Jim Garrison said, “The truth is the most important value we have.”
It is a charge I take seriously and The Independent takes seriously, and it is one I am glad to learn some readers take seriously as well.
Dan Brooks, of the Missoula Independent (no relation) penned it best, ”You can run a newspaper without professional reporters in much the same way you can run a democracy without newspapers: badly.”
We need both.
See you out there.
Dallas Hyland is a freelance writer, award-winning photographer, and documentary filmmaker. As a senior writer, opinion editor and photo editor of The Southern Utah Independent, Hyland’s investigative journalism, opinion columns, and photo essays have ranged in topics from local political and environmental issues, to drug trafficking in Utah, as well as the international front, covering issues such as human trafficking in Colombia. On his rare off-days, he can be found with his family and friends exploring the pristine outdoors. You can listen to him live as a regular guest co-host on the Kate Dalley talk show on Fox News 1450 AM 93.1 FM in southern Utah.
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