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Dr. Roger Simpson: The second lesson is about telling
the truth, the commandment that most journalists say they try to honor.
What you should know at the outset is that it's
an extraordinarily difficult goal to achieve.
In fact, retaining the truth may be impossible.
There are several barriers preventing the journalist from reaching the truth.
First is language.
The reality of something may be apparent to us,
but language itself limits our capacity to convey that reality.
The second barrier is the conventions that
journalism itself imposes on passing on the truth.
These are conventions about story length, kinds of stories,
the way things are phrased, how ideas captured.
The third barrier is the skill of the individual journalist,
how well he or she can turn that sense of reality into words or pictures.
The fourth barrier resides in each of us.
Our amazing propensity to hear a truth from someone else
and reinterpret it completely to satisfy our own needs and ideas.
So the message of this lesson is that the truth is very hard to get close to,
but the best journalists do reach that level.
In the other part of the lesson, I'm going
to walk you through a complicated case that
shows how journalists faced several dilemmas, the alternative actions they
considered, and the decisions they made and how they played out.