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Yearly Archives: 2017
Radio Interview with Steve Curtis — Ethics of the Day
Listen to my interview this Monday on Wake Up with Steve Curtis on KLZ Denver.
Click here for The Ethics of our Day.
In Search of Journalistic Integrity
What are the hottest news topics of the New Year?
I turned to Google News to find out. By adding “2017” in my computer’s search bar, I created my own (small and unscientific) database profiling some of the most reported current events topics.
One might expect – naively, to be sure – that the most pressing issues of the day would populate the brightest constellations of reportage across the firmament of internet news. So let’s take a look at which topics got the most hits:
- Vladimir Putin: 15.6 million
- Terrorism: 24.7 million
- Climate change: 29 million
- Gay: 41.5 million
- Israel: 74.4 million
Now what can we make of all this?
Is there a difference between “opinion” and “bias”?
On Tuesday 3 January — apparently in response to a hail of letters accusing the paper of editorial bias — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a full-page editorial attempting to justify their approach to opinion pieces. I responded as follows:
Dear Editors,
In last Tuesday’s defense of your paper’s opinion pages, you claim that your reporting is free from editorial influence. Many would dispute this point, but I wish to address a more objectionable assertion in your argument.
You write: “Where you will absolutely find bias is on the opinion pages.” This remark is as astonishing as it is disconcerting.
Bias and opinion are not synonyms. Bias is by definition emotional, often to the point of irrational. Opinion expresses a principled position, ideally based on accurate information and sound reasoning.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed that you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. A responsible news organization, however, is duty bound to make sure that its opinion pieces are fact-based and logically developed. This requires an understanding of both sides of an issue and the commitment to intellectual integrity. Only then is an opinion deserving of publication.
Hail to the new chief
Congratulations to Missouri’s new governor, Eric Greitens.
After serving as a Navy Seal, devoting his career to help returning veterans, and defining himself according to the value of character over ideology, Governor Greitens will enter his new role as public servant with today’s inauguration ceremony.
He offers the kind of hope that we all so desperately look for: modesty, civility, and a commitment to service above political agendas. He faces the challenges of anyone who seeks to confront a culture of entrenched partisanship and cronyism.
King Solomon says that the heart of kings is in the hands of God. May the Almighty guide him and all our leaders to recognize what is right, to retain purity of vision and purpose, and to rally support to lead us on the path of peace and prosperity.
Write your Headline before you Run your Story
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
How often have we heard someone say that? How many times have we said it ourselves? And it almost always comes as a response to the same question:
“What were you thinking?”
Our minds have a funny way of convincing us that our ideas will succeed on strength of creativity, sincerity, ingenuity, and necessity. We might have identified the true source of the problem; we might have formulated a real solution; we might be 100% committed to making things better.
But none of that is enough without two critical components:
Implementation and perception.
It’s about time
Are you feeling more rested this week? Do you notice your watch running a smidgen fast? Maybe it’s because of the leap-second added by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on New Year’s Eve.
A few of us may take comfort knowing that our clocks are back in sync with the earth’s relative positive to the sun, and find it reassuring that all the cosmic gears and cogs are once again in perfect alignment. The rest of us couldn’t care less.
Does it really matter?
Well, yes; it just might.
There are two ways to look at time. First, as a convenient touchstone for organizing our lives. Without some universal standard for tracking our days and our hours, imagine the trouble we would have arranging our affairs and interactions.
But you can also make the case that time really does mean something.
All the things that might have been
What happens to the road not taken? Does it wait for us to return, or does it blink out of existence? And if we do return, is it truly the same road, since we ourselves have changed?
What about us: do we divide into two at every fork, with one alternate version of ourselves taking one way and another the other? And if that is so, might we reconnect further down the path of life, or crisscross, or switch back onto the road we left untraveled?
What of the people we meet along the way? Are we destined to meet them no matter which road we follow, or do future friends and cohorts come into existence and disappear with every choice we make? Will we find our soul mates whichever path we choose, or do different choices make us different people with different souls and different soul mates?
If you’re expecting me to answer these questions, you might as well stop reading here. I have no more idea than you do, and maybe less. But I do have a story about crossing paths and hidden possibilities.
Yonason Goldson 