Swimming Upstream in Today's World

There is an old tale popular in non-profit circles, one I first heard from the venerable Anwar Fazal, the Malaysian activist who, as much as any other person, has inspired me over the past many decades in my effort to try and balance professional journalism with a social conscience.

The story, as I recall it, goes like this. You are standing next to a river, when you notice a drowning baby being swept by the current, so you step in, grab her, dry her off, and place her safely on the ground next to you.

Just then, out of the corner of your eye, you spot another drowning baby. You save him, and then, you spot yet another...

The point of this story is that you can spend a lifetime saving drowning babies without ever getting the chance to move up-river and find out who the hell is throwing these kids into the river in the first place.

The role of a journalist, in our society, is to be that person who makes it up-river. This work is hard, and even when you do it well, you are more likely to make new enemies than friends.

A lifetime spent in the craft has taught me that many among us do not want to know the scientific truth so much as they want their own conclusions to be confirmed.

But we journalists have no such luxury. To do our work well, we cannot simply substantiate our theories about how we would like to think this world works. We have to take into account each new piece of evidence we discover, particularly when it challenges our working theory, if we are to maintain our integrity.

In this way, we are like scientists, testing a hypothesis, gathering evidence, pushing to the point where we can publish our findings. We even have a version of peer review (called fact-checking) that, at least traditionally, acts as a check on any excesses we might otherwise assert.

Yet, then again, sadly, the process I describe is by and large now from bygone days. There are few fact-checkers left, not to mention copy editors, real editors, or any of the others who traditionally helped us achieve our best published findings and avoid our worst mistakes.

Today, more often than not, it's just us and our readers, unvarnished, unfiltered. As a lifelong writer, I don't mind this direct access to my readers, but I'm also aware that those others who used to help me have fallen silent, perhaps in ways that do not serve my readers' best interests.

And that makes me sad.

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