Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 February 1918 — WARY OLD BIRD IS TRUTH [ARTICLE]

WARY OLD BIRD IS TRUTH

Fact Worth Remembering When One Is Tempted to Criticise Errors Seen in Newspapers. “Where do you get the absurd facts you print?” is a favorite query put to newspaper men. In the view of these cynics, newspapers spend most of their time misspelling names, imagining incidents that never happened, and generally manhandling life as it is led. There is just one answer to be made to the query above, and that is: “Newspapers get such of their facts as are absurd from the absurd human beings who for one reason or a thousand refuse to relate facts accurately.” Newspapers, truth-telling newspapers, spend a very large part of their time correcting these misstatements, running them to their source, and getting at the truth. A certain proportion of error gets by—not as great a proportion as can be heard in any village neighborhood gossip, for it is the concern of newspapers—of honest ones, that Is—to allow for errors and correct them, whereas it is the concern of those other purveyors of news, gossips, to create errors whenever they are more interesting than the truth. The next time you find an error in your favorite newspaper, try an experiment. Try to capture one small fact yourself, in your own home town. You will quickly discover just how wary a bird the truth is and how very unpopular.—New York Tribune.