Jounalism 101

I want to outline a bit of why myself and other media professionals on the firearms side of the equation are appalled at the way CBS (and other MSMs, to tell the truth) routinely deal with gun issues, but first I want to tell you a couple of stories.

The first is when I was a baby journalist, just starting at my first "real" daily newspaper job in Florida. I'd been given a "killer" story — a bunch of dogs had gone missing from a local animal shelter! On such things careers were made...after poochies, the President! I'm investigating the missing pups when out of the blue a woman shows up and asks to speak to me. She's got this whole rap about dogs used in medical experimentation, and while she has not the slightest inkling of proof that my missing mutts are being turned in poochburger by an unfeeeling medical establishment, well, it could happen now, couldn't it?

Hmmmmm...a clerical error or Demon Doctors Destroy Doggies? I went for the alliteration, being careful not to say that man's best friends were in the railroad cars headed north, but only that it "could" have happened that way. About 30 minutes after turning in the story, I got a summons from the Big Cheese Editor-in-Chief (whose name, BTW, was Al Hutchinson, a newsman of the Old Skool). When I stepped into his office to no doubt be informed that they were making over 1-A to lede with Demon Doctors, he said, "Close the door behind you," my first hint that perhaps a Pulitzer Prize wasn't in my future.

What followed was roughly 30 minutes of having my butt raked over hot coals at about 80 decibels, including the "F" word about 40 times, a few suggestions about my parentage and the undeniable truth that the only reason I wasn't being killed outright was it was so damn hard to hide the body!

"She came in selling a load of crap," Mr. Big Cheese said, "and you bought the whole trainload."

Every word he said, except the ones about my mother, were dead on accurate, too. I had bought the entire trainload of crap.

"Could" turns out to be a really big word. Could the vanished canines have become poster pups for medical malpractice? You bet. Could a great big comet strike earth and wipe out all life except for sponges? Sure. Could Jen and Bratt find their way back to married bliss? Undoubtably. But none of those things are news stories! There are no "facts" in "could."

As importantly, I used information from an advocate, not a source. Information, said Le Cheese, can come from an advocate, but it is by definition questionable until verified from a source without an axe to grind. And even then, it needed to be tagged as having come from an advocate so the reader is never, ever, absolutely nada misled. Because if we mislead the reader, Mondo-Cheese-Man concluded, we have no right to the reader's trust!

Okay, this is running long...I'm going to break it up into a couple of additional posts!