Don’t Trust the Media. Trust Yourself.
It can be hard work—and the travel gets expensive—but it’s better than being lied to.
Of course you don’t have to trust the media. Instead, trust yourself.
Fact-check what you read. Report your own news. Here’s how:
REPORT IN PERSON. Let’s say you think there’s an amazing exposé to be done around a fatal incident. You have an inclination to believe that the — say, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012—might have been forged. Go to the town of the alleged event. Bring a voice recorder; your phone works well for in-person interviews, but to record phone calls you usually need paid software, like TapeACall. (To save money on transcription, try Trint.) Be sure to use an interpreter when you don’t speak your sources’ languages perfectly. If you’re reporting in a dangerous area, you may also need a fixer, a bodyguard, and a bulletproof vehicle. Talk to the police and military personnel, telling them your conversations with them are on the record. Record the conversations. Talk to the families of people killed in the event. Visit their graves. Talk to the family of perpetrator. Talk to all eyewitnesses. Shake their hands. Look them in the eye. Decide if they’re lying for yourself.
Bypass lawyers and PR people wherever possible. Make a timeline of events. Go to locations. See if peoples’ stories add up. If you suspect people of lying, ask other people, demand material evidence, think like a detective. Check the spelling of all of the names, streets, locations. Take photos. Satisfy your curiosity entirely. Then write your story on Medium. Start with “who, what, where, why, when.” Print it out. Underline every single fact—date, time, age, hair color—with a red pencil. Then check those facts again, even if you’re sure something is right. Call back your sources. Ask “David Smith” to spell his name. You can’t be sure of anything until you’ve checked it twice. Publish your story on Medium. If you are faulted for an error, correct it, with a note that the story originally had the fact wrong. (If you are faulted for being an idiot, ignore the comment entirely.)
USE PRIMARY SOURCES WHERE POSSIBLE. If someone is unable or unwilling to talk to you, turn to non-human sources that are not “media”—that is, sources that are unmediated by storytelling techniques or bias. These include documents, photographs, medical reports, police reports, receipts, letters, email, almanacs, journals. Keep your eyes open for incongruities. If two primary sources don’t add up, find a third to break the tie. Be sure to study the documents closely. If you’re reporting a story about a president’s executive order, read that order five times and look up every word that’s even faintly confusing or jargony.
USE REFERENCE BOOKS. Print dictionaries, almanacs and encyclopedias are edited within an inch of their lives not to contain errors of fact. When errors are found, the publishers are obliged to correct them. The jobs of these editors depend on their getting everything right; no one has a stake in giving wrong definitions or weather reports. Specialty reference books—The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Firearms: An Illustrated History—are also extremely useful in place of message boards and other online sources when you need just the facts. And by facts I mean things like: When did Destiny’s Child release its single “No, No, No”? What is a musket?
FOR NOW, LAY OFF THE INTERNET. There is an infinity of good information and resources on the Internet, but it can be extremely hard to sort out fact from fiction without years of training. For instance, if you search Google with a question, often the first few answers you get will come from sources with an agenda, who have essentially paid to be the first response to a question. (“Who is running for town council in my town?” may lead you to a paid advertisement for one of the candidates. But the ad is designed so you can’t tell it’s paid for.)
Similarly, Facebook is rife with people’s opinions and misperceptions. Good reporters would never trust Facebook (or Google or Twitter) for facts and news without extensively verifying them. Later, after you have been reporting and fact-checking for a year or two, you may find that reading the Internet becomes easier, and you know how to check sources on Wikipedia and how to be sure the links on Twitter are trustworthy. You may decide, cautiously, that you can take the word of The Guardian for the date of the Queen’s coronation, and the word of The Daily Racing Form for the winner of the Belmont Stakes.
FIND OTHERS WHO REPORT IN THIS WAY. There is much more to conscientious and ethical reporting than I have outlined here, but this is a good start. Practice it. Don’t trust the media. Do your own reporting. With time doing it yourself, however, you may find that some reporters at some media outlets also use these strategies. Now that you have acquired respect for the process and the craft, you may find there are other people, like yourself, who are exceptionally good at reporting in person, using primary sources, and consulting reference books. These reporters bring skepticism to everything they encounter online and their livelihoods and salaries depend on not publishing anything until they’re absolutely certain it’s true. If they get even the smallest matter of fact wrong, these reporters always publish corrections.
Still, listen to your doubts. Fact-check all stories for yourself, using the red pencil and #2 pencil method. Don’t trust anyone blindly. When a story checks out, you might tentatively trust the next one from the same outlet. Be prudent, though. Keep checking facts for yourself as long as you need to. Satisfy yourself that the reporters you’re reading are sticking to the rules of the road and behaving in good faith.
Only when you are satisfied this way, and know something of reporting yourself, you might even consider selectively trusting the media again. When and if you do, it may come as a great relief. Just as you don’t have to drive every bus you take, nor do you have to report and fact-check every story you read. Trust—when it’s earned—can be a wonderful thing.
