In my five decades in journalism, one of the best things I have learned is the value of skepticism. There’s an old journalism saw – “Your mother says she loves you? Check it out” – that serves ink-stained wretches well (although few of us are ink-stained anymore). Don’t take anything at face value. Question everything and check facts with the zeal of a pig sniffing truffles.
Pinned to my office bulletin board for over 20 years is a postcard from the brilliant lawyer and journalist Steven Brill (founder of The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, and Brill’s Content magazine). He’s launched a new venture, News Guard, aimed at deep fact checking and ferreting out fake news from the real thing. He hopes that will be an antidote to Donald Trump’s trumpeting any news story he doesn’t like as “fake news.”
The postcard from Brill’s Content says it all for me. Here are the points it makes:
“Skepticism is a weapon.
It deflects spin, propaganda, P.R., B.S., press agents, publicity seekers, hearsay, unnamed sources, and anyone with a hidden agenda.
Skepticism is that shared suspicion that all aspirin are alike.
Skepticism is a quality shared by truth seekers, freethinkers and realists.
Skepticism demands that proof and facts be unsanitized, uncensored and unembellished.
Skepticism makes the world accountable.
Skepticism is a virtue.”
I hope to bring that approach to this blog. It is at the heart of my concept of journalism after 50 years of practice. And I hope that, after all that time, I am pretty good at it. Not perfect, as nobody is perfect, not even a president who believes he is. I seek the truth, not The Truth.
As I have sometimes said to readers – and friends – who read something I have written and don’t believe it or like it, “I don’t make this crap up.”
Thanks, Steve Brill, and good luck in your new venture.
–Kennedy Maize