At one time I had understood that the job of journalists with a story was to answer who, what, where, when and why, “the five Ws”.  Any opinion was left for the Opinion Page.  I believe learned this in a journalism class in middle school.  This certainly is not the case now.

Walter Hussman, who worked as a reporter for Forbes magazine and is the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in an interview he gave on October 18, 2019 on the role of journalism stated, “Our role is not to divine the truth, our role is to gather all the facts, verifiable facts we can, and give those to the readers. Let them determine what that truth is”.

Printed on the second page of each of the 10 daily newspapers Hussman’s family publish are the core values that his publications adhere to.  Specifically, to truth-seeking, they state, “The pursuit of truth is a noble goal of journalism. But the truth is not always apparent or known immediately. Journalists’ role is therefore not to determine what they believe at that time to be the truth and reveal only that to their readers, but rather to report as completely and impartially as possible all verifiable facts so that readers can, based on their own knowledge and experience, determine what they believe to be the truth”.

To report completely and impartially all the verifiable facts so that readers can determine what they believe is the truth.  I’ll go with this standard but with today’s media this is a significant challenge.  One place to start may be with whether a particular media subscribes in writing to the Core Values as advocated by Hussman.  In my research some have but a great many have not. Reading the content itself quickly reveals when the journalist strays from the 5 Ws.

My feeling is that once someone purported to be a journalist strays beyond the who, what, where, when and why with verifiable facts they are no longer are journalist.  What they are is certainly something else.

The search for the truth continues.

The complete Arkansas Democrat Gazette Core Values can be found at the following:

https://www.arkansasonline.com/corevalues/

Your constructive comments are welcome.

The Fair-minded Thinker