When journalists are toddlers

I've always known that there's a tension between writing an accurate article and finding an interesting angle. But until this week, I hadn't experienced it for myself. I guess our homework is doing its job.

In the past, I've simply attempted to ask salient follow-up questions, letting my interview subjects dictate the discussion's direction. This time, however, that technique left me with a series of meandering conversations, which meant that I had to excavate an interesting angle and reconnect with my sources for verification. It was a longer process than I expected, but nothing soul crushing.

It left me with an interesting question, though: how much truth is typically lost in technicalities?

It would have been easy to pull out-of-context quotes from those meandering conversations and use them to subtly misrepresent the speaker's point. And since the quotes wouldn't technically be inaccurate (in some cases, even the interviewee might have missed it), the truth would have been replaced by something that's slightly more interesting.

Political campaigns are often far more overt about this kind of thing. They recast the context with a serious-sounding voiceover and then play a misleading video clip. I'd like to think that most of us understand that politicians are trying to accomplish something entirely different than journalists, but given the partisanship of today's media outlets, I'm not sure if that's true anymore.

And it makes me wonder if this new school of journalism is more interested in finding interesting stories, through loopholes and technicalities, than publishing the truth.

While drafting this, I heard the sound of a squealing dog and a laughing toddler coming from down the hall. I jumped up to investigate and found that my two-year-old had somehow managed to pin Monty, our 14-year-old miniature pincher, with some kind of elaborate wrestling maneuver. I pulled them apart, verified that none of the dog's bones had been broken, and put the toddler in his timeout chair.

After the punishment was over, we had a conversation about what happened. In two-year-old english, he explained that I never told him that he wasn't allowed to tackle Monty. I only told him that he wasn't allowed to tackle our other dog, RoboCop.

He thought he had found a loophole, and technically he had. But his behavior still got him in trouble. Sometimes the truth isn't interesting, but I'd rather be less entertaining than end up in a timeout chair.