Excuse Me While I Play God for a Moment

WICHITA, Kansas - There are two sides to every story: the part that goes in the paper and the part that doesn't. The great mission of the reporter is to find information, the great burden of a reporter is to select which facts to broadcast.

There are times as a reporter, including here in Wichita, that I've had information that I wanted to share with the general public but couldn't. It wasn't a question of whether the information was relevant or valid, or even true -- it was that this information was not obtained in a way that makes it runnable in the paper.

Newspapers have very good reasons for the standards they employ. They are in many cases excellent reasons. Legal obligation. Being able to confirm information. Not reporting something until the full truth is known.

But this also means that people who know the system of the paper, what we can publish and we cannot, sometimes come off better in print than those do not. Oftentimes these are people who already have trouble with traditional avenues of power: minorities religious, ethnic and racial. But what can I do? I'm more than happy to print their side of the story, but it needs to be presented in an acceptable way. If they refuse to do so, there's not much I can do.

This might be too vague to make sense, but I'm sure you understand that in a case like this I can't provide examples. Here are some historical quandaries:

1. Should the newspaper report the name of the Kobe Bryant alleged rape victim?
2. Should the newspaper allow informants to criticize the government if they refused to be identified? Under what circumstances should this be allowed; ie it affects a war or national security?
3. Does gossip belong in a newspaper? What if people like it?

This feel is a common among reporters. Maybe it's why newsrooms are always full of rumor and gossip. The spoken word is the only way these interesting stories are getting told.

It doesn't solve the problem. Remember this Chinese idiom: 口说无凭立字为据. "Spoken words fly away, written words remain."