News Business

We lie.
We don’t always mean to, but we do.
We’re in a hurry, overworked, and just don’t care any more.
Now and then, we have our own agendas, buy that’s for the names, the guys you recognize from chat shows, not the anonymous drones who bring you 90% of the news.
We used to care we were young. We had dreams.
Now we have mortgages, and editors who don’t want to hear.
And what’s the point of fighting for one article, when your editor will publish twenty opinion pieces and spin merchants calling it a lie, until only the lie survives.
We’d love to tell the truth, but the truth gets you sued.
Or fired.
Even when we tell the truth, we lie, just by choosing which truths to tell.
Twice in the last few weeks, there were stories I absolutely knew were true. In one case, there were court records and a judicial verdict. In another case, rare enough for these days, a journalist had left the office and telephone and actually witnesses something first hand.
Both stories were killed by a solicitor’s letter.
So we lie with incomplete truths, because paper needs ink, and deadlines are stone.