Article August 3, 1998 Issue

The truth without darkness and despair

By the time I was twelve, I knew I wanted to be in the news business. By the time I was sixteen, I knew the reason why: because being a reporter, being in news, was the closest thing I could find to telling the truth, at getting at the truth. That seemed to be at the very heart of journalism.

After 20 years in the business, I still find journalism at its best to be truth-telling. ... But truth-telling informed by Christian Science portrays the unvarnished reality of the human situation, yet refuses to leave the reader/listener/viewer at a point of darkness and despair. That kind of truth-telling investigates who is looking for answers to the problems and what those answers might be. ... And that is a key part of any story.

Truth-telling informed by Christian Science also focuses much less on the surface evidence—the "face of the sky"—and much more on the "signs of the times," to take a riff from Jesus' statement in Matthew 16:3. ... That kind of truth-telling doesn't get thrown by the evidence of the moment, although it also doesn't ignore the evidence. ...