What Is Truth?
A Peek Inside a Reporter’s Creed
An unusual offer came my way less than a month before I was to begin college. How would I like to train as a newspaper reporter at the same time as I went to school?
It really was a sweetheart deal. I’d work twenty hours a week during the semester, full-time over the summers, and who knows? By the time I’d graduate I could be a full-fledged newspaperman.
I was 17 going on 18 then, and I’d done well in high school English, particularly my senior year. I figured I’d probably become a writer. I knew writers like Ernest Hemingway honed their skills as newspaper writers. It seemed smart for me to accept the offer.
So I did. I worked for the local evening daily in the above arrangement for two years before I quit. I didn’t like the daily newspaper routine and rhythm. A weekly suited me better, as I learned when I became an editor of my college newspaper, aptly named The Student Weekly.
But the daily grind taught me how to write a newspaper article, which saved my butt in situations later in life when I needed a job, even if I had to work again on a daily.
By that somewhat imprecise route, then, I became a part-time media person professionally involved in the subject of Truth. As a reporter I had a duty to tell the truth. In fact, to be…