truth hurts

 truth hurts

I love Dan Rather.

I grew up watching journalists like him who understood that journalism wasn't supposed to make politicians comfortable. It was supposed to make the public informed.

Dan Rather once said journalists should “try to find out the truth as close as is humanly possible.”

That sentence has been sitting in my head lately.

Because yesterday I watched a clip of Donald Trump speaking somewhere — but without the usual White House press pool, there were no microphones and no television cameras providing the normal coverage.

And apparently… nobody could hear him. 😂🤣😂

You can remove the reporters.

You can remove the cameras.

But then who is left to hear you?

It sounds funny, but underneath the laughter is something much more serious.

What happens when the journalists who spent their lives chasing facts are gone?

What happens when journalism becomes increasingly dependent on advertising, subscriptions, ratings, clicks and wealthy owners?

What happens when the story that makes money isn't necessarily the story that matters most?

And what happens when politicians understand that controlling access can also mean controlling what gets seen?

I keep thinking about this because I am not a traditional journalist. I'm a blogger. I don't have a newsroom, a giant budget, a team of researchers or someone checking every sentence before I hit publish.

I'm just one person trying to look at the world, investigate things that interest me, check what I can, connect pieces of information and share what I hope is true.

And that raises some uncomfortable questions.

10 questions I keep asking myself

1. Who actually controls the truth when the people who control the money also control the biggest microphones?

2. If advertising pays for journalism, can journalism ever be completely independent of the people paying for the advertising?

3. When clicks and ratings determine what gets attention, are we reporting what people need to know — or what keeps them watching?

4. What happens to important stories that are complicated, slow and difficult to explain, but aren't profitable?

5. When politicians call something “fake news,” how do ordinary people determine whether they're attacking bad journalism — or simply attacking journalism they don't like?

6. When journalists make mistakes, should losing trust be permanent — or should accountability, corrections and transparency be part of rebuilding it?

7. If a blogger discovers something important before a major news organization does, does that make it journalism — or does journalism require something more?

8. How much of what we believe is actually something we investigated ourselves, and how much came from whichever screen happened to reach us first?

9. Who gets to decide which voices are credible — governments, corporations, editors, algorithms, audiences, or all of us together?

10. And perhaps the hardest question: if I say I am only trying to share the truth, how do I make sure I am not simply sharing what I want to be true?

That last one matters to me.

Because I don't want to become part of the problem I'm questioning.

I can be wrong.

Journalists can be wrong.

Bloggers can be wrong.

Governments can be wrong.

Corporations can be wrong.

And audiences can be wrong.

That's why I think the goal isn't pretending any one person has a monopoly on truth.

Maybe the goal is to keep looking.

Keep questioning.

Keep checking.

Keep listening to people we don't automatically agree with.

And when we discover we were wrong, say so.

Dan Rather has spent decades talking about the responsibility of journalism to seek the truth as closely as humans can.

Maybe that responsibility doesn't belong only to journalists anymore.

Maybe it belongs to anyone holding a camera, writing a blog, posting a video, sharing a story — or simply deciding whether to press share.

Truth hurts sometimes.

But silence can hurt a whole lot more.