Day 19: in which you shouldn't trust what you read in the papers

This, up there, is my typewriter. It is only one of the many tools I use to spread lies and panic among the masses.

Now. Please read the following, but only if you feel like it/having nothing pressing/are comfortable/are inclined/are happy/are unhappy/are bored beyond all belief:

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."
- Norman Mailer, American novelist, journalist, and all around writer person


I woke up this morning later than I meant to after a night with less sleep than I had planned to a house that was colder than I expected and for breakfast I ate a doughnut that for some reason I had stuck in the freezer the night before. My car didn't start so I cursed life and scrambled down the nearest hill to work. In the office, I spent the first hour desperately trying to get a hold of three different people I had talked to the day before to confirm weak points in the story that was going to go to print in a few hours. No sooner did I have that behind me then I realized that all the people who were supposed to e-mail me information (deadline is tomorrow) hadn't done so during the night. So I spent the next hour on the phone, tracking people down, smiling sweetly into my overheating cell phone. For forty minutes I talked to a woman about the local food market, gleaning phone numbers and farm information. Then my editor peaked around the corner and asked me to call a woman about some cancer.

Which brings us to right now and why you should never trust journalists.

I have spent most of this afternoon calling, waiting for calls, and reading sketchy information about a certain type of cancer. I have, in fact, just finished the story for tomorrow's paper where it will do what it's supposed to do: parade as fact. The key words here are "parade" and "as". I'm not a doctor. My personal experience with cancer is zero although I know people who currently have, who had, or who are dead from it. But I'm trotting out numbers and I'm writing down quotes. There are a million questions I could ask. This story could unwind for years. What's it all really about? Where are these numbers coming from? Why do we live in this delusion that medical reports represent actual reality? Medicine is as much an ideology as anything else.

What people will read tomorrow will be the earnest attempts of a 22-year-old sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted, doughnut-for-breakfast nurtured, recently graduated, crashing through information gears at record pace, three stories in the space of a morning, fact juggler female pseudo journalist. Why on earth would you take her word on anything?

Journalists are all on a deadline, be they ever so committed and idealistic, earnestly peddling their writerly wares. We are producing a product. In one morning, I have to be an expert on the dedication of historical markers, local food and small farm policies and politics and psychology, and then hospitals and cancer research and cancer death rates in an Oregon county. Over all of this, I'm scrambling to put together a special section, deadline is tomorrow. I'm pulling one million strings of information and I ran out of fingers sometime last week.

But, anyway, all that aside, you really should go out and read a newspaper. Seriously. I have to go home and plug my phone into a charger and tell it nice things so that it doesn't cry itself to sleep tonight.