1. Today I moved about a million pages of documents & notes. Just one box contained over 100 yellow pads, scribbled on both sides with interview notes. These are the documents I retained from my reporting - maybe 1/6 of the total. And seeing them made me sad for this country...
2...reporting, when done right, is hard work. You have to review every report, speak to every participant, check your own assumptions, argue against your own conclusion to find the weaknesses. Reading, calling, gathering. Finding the experts. Prying info out of participants....
3...there was a time when all of this work, done over weeks and months and sometimes years, would be published and Americans would say "Oh, I learned something." But too many people no longer have any concept of what knowledge is. They know what they believe - and belief trumps..
3....information. I have spent a month reporting something, written it, then heard people give their responses to the headline. We are an achingly ignorant nation, and it is across the board. Doctors study for many years, take exams, get credentialed, must have continuing....
4...medical education, but all of us have Google Medical School. I know many doctors and they now spend enormous amounts of time trying to persuade people that whatever nonsense they found on the internet is not medicine, that vaccines are essential, that raw cinnamon is not...
5....a miracle drug. And often, when they are unable to persuade the patient that maybe a doctor with years off education knows more than some guy who did a quick internet search of blogs, they must relent and let their patients engage in harmful behavior. Scientists, from....
6...climatolgists to biologists to geologists - have to confront people who couldn't pass high school chemistry saying they don't "believe" science they have never read, as if "belief" has any role in science whatsoever. You read the research, you find the flaws, and report....
7...them,. If you cant do that, your "opinion" has as much worth as people who scream "fake news" at well-reported stories simply because they dont like them, or scream "butter will cure diabetes." The internet has given us access to greatest knowledge available. But it has....
8...also given us access to "facts" - out of context, poorly understood pieces of information stacked in deceptive piles for the purpose of creating an outcome and convincing the very ignorant that they know more than people who have worked for knowledge. If what you do is ,,,
9...watch networks or read magazines or websites because you KNOW that they will always feed you what you already believe, you are not informed. You are a moron. And if you dont have a million pages of documents from reporting, or medical research at your hand, or peer-reviewed..
10...literature on the non-medical sciences, and if you can't discuss all of those intelligently based on KNOWLEDGE, not cherry-picked facts and spin, then you are part of the problem of this country. I dont know more than a climatologist about climate. If you dont do the....
11...work on ANY speciality, you don't have the knowledge. And if you think you do, then look up Dunning Kruger. That is you, and you are destroying America in a cesspool of arrogant stupidity.
12....some people seem to be taking this to mean I am giving up. Nope. Never. Journalism is too important for the health of this country for reporters to abandon it - even if more than half the country has no idea why.
