By John Breunig, Editorial Opinion – As I participated in the “Truth & Journalism” panel discussion at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury Wednesday night, I wondered how long we could talk before getting sidetracked by President Donald Trump and “Fake News.”
Trump didn’t invent the toxic phrase, but he did brand it into a potent political weapon. Over the past decade I have occasionally wondered if some journalists raised their game in response to the childish slights (no, Mr. President, that is not a suggestion to take credit and start drafting a Pulitzer acceptance speech). But the bottom line is that it is hard to talk about truth and journalism in 2026 without being distracted by the only POTUS to launch his own social media platform (named, without intended irony, Truth Social).
Yet the five of us on the panel managed to summon the name “Trump” only once (and yeah, that’s on me). So, our conversation was rather disciplined. Yet, days later, I find myself continuing to ponder the essence of truth.
The discussion was shepherded by WCSU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Stephen Hegedus and also featured CT Mirror Executive Editor Elizabeth Hamilton, CT Mirror Managing Editor Stephen Busemeyer, Connecticut Public reporter Eddy Martinez and JC Barone, a WCSU professor of communication and media arts.
We managed not to agree on The Truth in the very first question, regarding whether it is objective, subjective or otherwise.
Hamilton offered a graceful answer about the deep meaning it has to her roles as “a journalist and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a person in this world and … a poet.”
Busemeyer, who has a background as a data editor, identified it as a “trick question.”
“Because whenever we say the truth, you can easily make an argument that it’s not, or at least that it’s subjective, right?” he offered. “But for me, the tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Yeah, it makes a sound. Of course it does.”
See, I’m going to disagree right there. Science hears a sound. Philosophy does not.
Journalism can take either approach.
Martinez explored how as a radio reporter he experiences “the tactile sense of what truth is” by hearing “the pain in someone’s voice when they talk to me about losing a family member during the 9/11 attacks.”
So, put Martinez on the subjective roster. And Barone put himself in the objective lineup.
I enjoyed comparing notes with Busemeyer because we’ve both worked in the news (objective) and opinion (subjective) sides of newsrooms. A news story can get all the facts right but still miss an essential truth.
And regardless of which side of the newsroom wall I’ve been working on, I’ve always recognized that while newsroom journalists aspire to remain dispassionate, they express an opinion with the simple act of choosing which stories to cover.
As an assignment editor, my ethos was that journalists must remain mindful not to shove stories on paths they anticipate or want them to go. Let the truth guide the narrative.
I also follow this news tip from the late Jim Dwyer, a fellow editor-in-chief of Fordham University’s student paper who went on to win two Pulitzers: Whenever you put someone in a hole, it’s fair play to offer them a shovel to dig out.
The Truth is also different from getting the facts right. Journalists work quickly and now have fewer editors than ever to shield them. But we hate making mistakes and sincerely want to correct them.
One morning when I was the Stamford Advocate’s city editor, a man called up to bark at me because his name appeared in the newspaper’s police blotter next to a crime he wasn’t charged with. A few minutes later his father called to bark even louder that I would soon be hearing from a well-known attorney they had retained. While I waited for that call, I connected the dots to the error. The police reporter had jotted the charges down next to the wrong name.
Clearly, the reporter had not summoned the name of the aggrieved party out of thin air. I sent him back to the cop shop to document the real charges.
By the time the lawyer called me, I was armed with the facts. I told him the correction would necessitate clarifying his client’s true charges, which were (objectively) worse than the ones we falsely reported.
“Let’s forget the whole thing,” he replied.
Which left me in a quandary. I called the newspaper’s legal counsel, filled him in and asked about the best course regarding a correction. “If they no longer want one, my advice is to let it be,” he replied.
Let it be. Not always the same thing as the truth.
I recently ran into a similar conundrum on the Opinion page. A guest op-ed about 9/11 drew fire from a reader challenging its veracity. After hearing from both parties, I facilitated a private meeting between them (they did not know one another). They had breakfast. Instead of debating everything in print, they settled their differences face-to-face.
I don’t know if truth was revealed. But trust can be achieved when we look one another in the eye. Truth is that sound in the forest. Trust will always be the forest.