Garnering Insight: Let’s be reasonable
SKYE POURNAZARI/THE FORUM
EDITORIAL MUG: Ken Garner
There are times as a publisher and owner when readers and non-readers alike of our newspaper have asked, why did you print this story or go with that editorial or column because they did not necessarily agree with the topic or believed that the facts should be kept in the dark.
My answer is generally because the job of a newspaper is to report on facts, and columns or editorials are based on opinions, but have an equally important place in the public forum. I also contend that the public cannot make an informed opinion on issues without having the facts, and that means all the facts, not cherry-picking the ones we like and throwing away the ones we don’t.
I now have a new response for some of the naysayers out there.
Be reasonable.
Well, it’s not really a new response. It comes from the May 26, 1898, edition of the Worth County Times. Here is the brief that appeared in that week’s paper.
“Be Reasonable
When you ask an editor to suppress an item of news because it does not suit you, then go ask your grocer to exclude pickles from his store because you cannot eat them, or your butcher to quit keeping bologna because it goes against your stomach. There is just as much fairness in one as the other. News is the editors stock in trade. So are pickles to the grocer and bologna to the butcher.”
This nugget of wisdom from more than 100 years ago applies just as much today, if not even more so than it did before the turn of the 20th century.
Being reasonable is something that is in short supply these days as more often than not, both sides of nearly every issue only want their version of the “facts” told.
For the most part I have always held to the tenet that there are three sides to every story: one from each perspective and the third being somewhere in between — in which lies the truth. It is up to the journalists of community newspapers to parse through the information provided, find the facts and relay that into a news story. Sometimes those news stories present topics for opinion columns or newspaper editorials.
The goal of newspapers, through news stories and reports as well as opinion columns and editorials, is to inform the public, promote thought and conversation and to be a champion for the community.
So with that in mind, I will always be reasonable. I just hope everyone else can do the same.
Ken Garner is the owner and publisher of The Maryville Forum and The Post.
