Gatekeepers

This is a real conversation between my friend Stanhope and his new boss on Stan’s first day in a Chicago newsroom.

Boss: “Does your mother love you?”

Stan: “Uh, yes?”

Boss: “How do you know?”

Stan: “[?]”

Boss: “Ask her.”

So Stan called his mother at home and asked her. She confirmed that she did actually love him, and Stan reported back to his new boss, who said, “Now you know.” It was a ritual of teaching the boss ran on many of his new kids. Sy Hersh tells the same story.

A few blocks away from where Stan worked, I was an assistant to the City Editor of a big Chicago newspaper, answering the phone at night. A copy kid. The bottom rung on the ladder of newspapering. We were covering an airplane crash and had a reporter, Mel, on the scene. Mel called in and I talked to him.

Mel: “There are four dead.”

Me to my boss: “Mel says there are four dead.”

My boss, without looking up: “Ask him how he knows.”

Me on phone: “He wants to know how you know.”

Mel: “Fireman told me.”

Boss: “Ask him how many bodies he saw.”

I was being taught to think like a reporter: What do we know and how do we know it. 

Newspaper and TV news reporting has regular disciplined procedures, to figure out what is a fact, what’s true. There are formulas for publishing information that readers, you and I, can judge for ourselves. So, in the paper you might read that this or that happened “according to police” or some such phrase.  On TV you see for yourself, a sound bite from a person. The process creates a kind of chain of evidence for the ‘fact.’ The reporters and editors have collected the evidence, organized it, presented it. You and I can judge for ourselves.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill,” Jill’s mother said.

Now you know. 

This discipline, with its extraordinary strengths and some serious faults, made for a kind of authority, trust. As best we could make it, what was in the paper was true and complete. If we weren’t sure, it didn’t get in. My Chicago Sun-Times published five editions over 12 hours every day, the first, the bulldog, about 4:30 in the afternoon, the last at dawn the next morning. Across Michigan Avenue our competition, The Chicago Tribune, was doing the same thing, their versions coming out about 15 minutes before or after ours. One of us copy kids would go to the Trib loading doc to get copies (‘hot off the press’) and our editors would page thru, looking for anything they had and we didn’t -- a person’s age, a quote, an entire story.  Three hundred sixty five days a year.  The process was meant to ensure that you could count on what you read in the paper.  The process was professional, competitive, disciplined -- our  best effort to see that what we printed was true.

Time passed. I moved up the professional ladder. 

The end of a magazine assignment, after weeks, sometimes months of reporting and writing, is the fact checker. After editors and I have our go, I meet with the person who makes me prove every assertion, fact, and quote in the story. Who told you that? -- give me the phone number to confirm. What was that document? --  I’ll need a copy. Let me hear the interview tape.  The checker is a compulsive second brain focused on getting everything right. Annoying and difficult as it was, it made me a better writer, and a much more careful reporter. What the fact checking process meant to all of us is that if it was in print in a respectable professional journal, it was very likely to be accurate. 

Of course I made mistakes in my working life. While I was reporting on California farm labor for a news magazine, a PR guy lied to me and I believed him and wrote something untrue. It was more than 40 years ago and I have not forgotten. A friend -- still a friend -- gave me a video tape of very ugly clear cut logging which wasn’t where she claimed and my TV station got busted by the misrepresented logging company. Once, cutting a documentary, I let a video editor talk me into using an audio mix that was fundamentally unreal. Corrections followed. But beyond that, I was wrong and regret it. 

And worse. All those years ago in Chicago, one night on the desk I took a call from a guy, late. He was drunk, and behind the alcohol he was upset. The ice cream trucks working the hot Chicago streets, he told me, were selling junk food. “There’s no real milk in the ice cream. No milk.” He was almost weeping. I can still hear him. The children were sold unhealthy food. It was true but I blew him off. I mean, who knew?

At the campus paper I ran in Chicago, terrified Iranian foreign students tried to convince me their own government was spying on and threatening them. Come on. Undercover agents of the Shah of Iran? Skulking around the corridors of my university? Red Squad Chicago cops helping them? Seriously? I didn’t believe them, but of course it was all completely true, and some of those brave young men ... what happened to them back in Iran, what were the consequences? I don’t know but I’m so sorry I was naive, that I didn't bother to look into what was true. 

I’m more careful now but, folks, the Internet and some print and broadcasters aren’t.  Unlike the old newspapers, the Walter Cronkites of back then, there is often no process to make even the smallest effort to know if something’s true. We’re on our own. A Facebook Friend of ours told us a couple of weeks ago that it is “well known that Dr. Fauci has a financial interest in the Moderna vaccine.”  Well known and also not true. 

           As you write the Facebook note or letter to the editor or tell the friend, just keep asking yourself, “How do I know?” It’s a start. 

– Mariposa, June 2025

– posted to blogger 9/23/26

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