By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Democracy doesn’t work without an informed and participatory citizenry. That’s why Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he’d prefer the latter. It’s why Justice Hugo Black wrote that, “a free press is a condition of a free society.”

This may be truer now than ever before, because the problems that we face are so consequential, and yet so complex. But numerous studies suggest that more people are more ignorant about the economic, social, and political forces shaping their lives than at any time in living memory.

They’re not getting much help. The U.S. news and entertainment industries have merged and are annually spending about $1 billion less on actual reporting than they did ten years ago.

In 1878, legendary newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer had written, “The money power has grown so great that the issue of all issues is whether the corporations shall rule this country, or the country shall again rule the corporations.” Today, Pulitzer’s New York World no longer exists, and nine transnational corporations dominate the news/entertainment industry: General Electric, AT&T/Liberty Media, Disney, Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Seagram and Bertelsmann.

They and their junior colleagues are not giving us the comprehensive information that we need to fully understand our world and make wise political decisions. Instead, they uncritically pass on to us spin, simplistic explanations, ideologically framed distortions, and politics-as-blood-sport election coverage.

This is as true in Somerville as it is nationally. Thirty years ago, the Somerville Journal did investigative reporting. The Board of Alderman initiated substantial legislation and conducted vigorous policy debates. Groups like Somerville United Neighborhoods, Citizens for Participation in Politics, Somerville Taxpayers Association, and a broad-based reform movement ensured that matters affecting ordinary people would get the full attention that they deserved.

These journalistic, aldermanic, and community watchdogs have since been defanged. Gatehouse Media now owns the Somerville Journal, along with 204 other newspapers spread across 20 states. Its overworked reporters are assigned so many stories that they can often do little more than embellish press releases.

As with the Boston Globe’s Somerville stringer, they don’t have the lived experience and in-depth knowledge of Somerville to put a story in its full context, or the time to excavate its roots. Somerville Scout has begun doing some investigative reporting, and it’s no coincidence that it’s a monthly publication.

One means of filling this journalism deficit is you, dear reader. You have years of personal experience understanding one or more important civic issues. Your investigations need not be constrained by this week’s looming deadline and the obligation to write six more stories before next week’s deadline.

If you can ask critical questions, doggedly pursue answers, and clearly communicate them to others, you can do journalism. But doing good journalism also requires humility before the truth, honesty, and ethics. So while I am urging you to become citizen journalists, I’m also going to be presumptuous and tell you what kind of journalism I as one citizen would like to consume.

Know the difference between the facts and the truth. Know that we can only understand the present moment when we locate it in an historical process.

Facts aren’t, by themselves, truth. Politicians, corporados and ideologues can spin a situation by selectively presenting facts so as to conceal the larger truth.

The truth is the whole that is greater than the sum of the facts. We only learn it piecemeal, and never completely. The truth is provisional. We can’t get at the truth if we drop in and out of the story.

There are vast stores of relevant information in plain sight. They reside in Board of Aldermen’s minutes, Secretary of State’s and Registrar of Deed’s databases, microfilmed news stories and Somerville Room documents at the library, individual property files at Inspectional Services, and many more places.

They also reside in the memories of people who have spent years engaged in the life of our city and its neighborhoods. Talk to people who are different from you. Try to see the story through their eyes. You will learn things you never knew, things that challenge your taken-for-granted assumptions. In ancient Greece, talking with strangers was a duty of citizenship.

I say “talk” to strangers, but as that old country lawyer Senator Sam Ervin was fond of saying, “you can’t learn nothing when you’re talking.”

Listen.

It’s good to quote sources. But don’t present what a source says as fact unless you have confirmed it in such a way that a reasonable person would agree that it’s been verified. Or make clear that it’s not verifiable.

Named sources are better than unnamed sources. Multiple sources are better than one source.

Understand the difference between bias and mistakes. Critics from the right regularly scorn journalists as left-wing elitists; those from the left accuse them of being corporate stooges. In fact, any time that a well researched and honestly reported story contradicts the status quo, those who don’t distinguish between the status quo and reality will perceive it as biased.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t make mistakes, which will also be seen as willful bias. The best antidote is to acknowledge and explain your mistakes as soon as you become aware of them.

Don’t replicate the mass-market media’s perversion of “objectivity” or Fox and other cable news channels’ disregard for the truth. If the evidence is unequivocal that one side of an argument is false, uncritically reciting all of the sides’ positions implies that they have equal merit, and that you don’t have a brain. Journalist/professor Jay Rosen describes this as “the view from nowhere.”

The nature of human cognition makes it impossible for us to be completely objective. So it’s a good idea to make your assumptions explicit, enabling readers and viewers to evaluate how they’ve influenced your reporting. And it’s a duty to not suppress legitimate evidence that supports an argument that you may disagree with.

Distinguish between the person and their behavior. Report the behavior, but don’t judge the person. The press has constitutional protections that no other industry enjoys. Don’t abuse them.

Never add anything to the story that isn’t really there. Try to assume nothing. Never deceive the audience.

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