He Read Us For Nineteen Years. Then We Told Him He Was Wrong.
Most of our postbag believes something we have investigated and could not stand up. The temptation is to write for the readers we wish we had. Here is why we don't, and where that argument stops.
A regular column. The views expressed are the writer's own.
A letter arrived on Tuesday from a man in Nebraska who has read this newspaper for nineteen years and wanted to tell me I had betrayed him.
The betrayal was The Null Result on Finland. He did not dispute a single fact in it. He disputed that we had run it at all.
His argument, which I am going to put as well as I can because it deserves to be put well: a newspaper is a thing you buy because it is on your side. He has been on our side for nineteen years. We took his money and used it to send two reporters to walk 1,340 kilometres in the snow and prove him wrong, and then we put it on the front page.
He is not stupid and he is not being unreasonable. I have thought about his letter every day since.
The easy answer, which is wrong
The easy answer is that we owe readers the truth and not comfort, and if that is unwelcome, so be it. Every editor has that sentence. Most of us have said it at a dinner and enjoyed saying it.
It is wrong because it is not an argument, it is a posture. It answers a question about obligation with a claim about virtue. And it lets me off the specific charge, which is not did you tell the truth — we did — but why did you go looking for that particular truth, at that particular cost, aimed at that particular reader.
That is a real question about editorial judgement and I do not get to answer it by looking noble.
The actual answer
We went looking because he would have found out.
Not from us: from somebody with worse motives, at a worse moment, in a form designed to humiliate him. The claim is checkable. Somebody was going to check it. The only question available to this newspaper was whether the person who told him would be the institution that had taken his subscription for nineteen years, or a stranger enjoying it.
I would rather it was us, and I would rather it was in 4,000 words that took the claim seriously, walked the border, published the tests in advance, and printed the one thread we could not close.
That is not a nobler answer than the easy one. It is a smaller one. It is the answer of a newspaper that has thought about what it is for and concluded, without much drama, that it is for finding things out and saying them to the people who paid for the finding out.
Where the argument stops
Here is the part I do not have a clean answer to, and I would rather write that sentence than pretend.
Our public editor has now made the case twice in these pages that the Null Result series is structurally safe — that we point it at claims which are jokes or which no evidence could ever confirm, and never at the contested things our readers actually believe. A reader in Trondheim made the same case in a letter last week, better.
They are right. The series has not, in seven years, cost this newspaper a reader it minded losing.
That is a comfortable position and I have been in it long enough to have noticed and not acted, which is worse than not noticing.
So: a Null Result on Nibiru was commissioned on Monday. Dr. Nkemelu is writing it, having volunteered before I asked, on the subject that fourteen of her own stories are built on. I do not know what it will find. I know what our archive suggests it will find and I know what our most-read list will do if it finds it.
To the man in Nebraska
You are owed three things by this newspaper and I want to be exact about which three.
You are owed the truth as best we can establish it, and the working, so you can check us.
You are owed the news that goes against us as readily as the news that goes against you — which is why every correction we have ever printed is a click away, unpaywalled, with its cause and its remedy, and why the complaint upheld against us is on our own website in the complainant's favour.
And you are owed the courtesy of being told to your face, at length, by people who put their names on it, rather than being managed.
You are not owed agreement. Nineteen years does not buy that and I am sorry, because I can hear from your letter that you thought it did.
— W. R. Frost, editor
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