While many think that running a magazine might be all glitz and glamour, most of the time it isn’t. Sometimes it feels like we are still back in Junior High dealing with cliques and gossip. Usually about us. We will line up some interesting interview with one musician, then another musician will get pissed at us for not doing things their way and tell the first musician not to talk to us. Then they will disappear and not even speak to us.
Yep, just like back in junior high. I tend to work with people even if I don’t personally like them, so it’s hard to understand why people act like this. If there was some ethical reason people don’t want to work with us, then great. That I get. But because some other person told us we don’t do things their way, and you want to gang up with them? Weird.
What does this have to do with the Truth? Well, we try not to be the Truth Police around here, and some want us to search out every word we print for “Truth.” Look, lots of people go around saying they “Just tell the Truth.” Usually, by “Truth” they mean something other than THE Truth.
Many people, when creating things like articles, documentaries, news reports, etc, will create a controversial piece and then just respond to the backlash with “I didn’t say anything. I just recorded what they said and presented it. It was just the truth. It was their words, not mine!” This is complete BS for many reasons.
First of all, interviewing people brings in all kinds of biases and contexts that affect what people say in the interview process. If the interviewee has a relationship or prior knowledge of the interviewer, that colors the interview with context and bias. Then the interviewer chooses to ask specific questions based on their bias. Then the interviewee answers based on their bias. Or not answer, or answer incorrectly, or a mixture of all three based on their bias.
Then of course, comes the process of creating the narrative. All articles, documentaries, etc have limits. The person creating them has to cut hours of interviews down into a much shorter piece. What they choose to keep and discard, and how they choose to present it, is all based on the bias and context of the writer.
The end product is a carefully crafted, contextual, biased narrative that was controlled by the writer (or documentarian, or news reporter, etc).
So telling “just the truth”? Hardly.
Telling a story? Certainly.
So that is why we try to take the approach that we do here at DTL. Shorter interviews (usually), but presented from beginning to end with all questions. And hopefully a blurb at the start to let you know something about the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee. It’s not the “Truth.” It’s the story of how the conversation happened.
Sometimes these stories don’t go where some think they should. Sometimes they call the writers and cuss them out on the phone. Like I said – a lot of drama for a free magazine that we all do for free in our spare(?) time.
There were some articles in the last issue that some felt went too far into ultra-conservative territory. That upset some readers (and a few of our writers). We didn’t want to edit out part of the story, but we also understand where words seemed like an attack on people that are trans. There are some stories this issue that would swing way to the other side of the political spectrum. There are people that have questioned why we have shared news stories by people that spew a bunch of hate online in the name of religion. We get not giving those people yet another platform, but what about people that kind of lean in the same direction, but don’t go as far and are still good people that just need to use better words?
It’s a bit hard to know where to draw the lines sometimes.
But we don’t want to avoid talking about hard issues because of this. So this “new direction” some have spoken of is really just a new context. We don’t really want to spread hate, whether right or left or center or towards anyone. We will remove parts of the story that have that. People have plenty of other places to express anything they want. We will have people with political and religious opinions. This issue sees more of that even. But it will be within the context that calling people “libtardians” and “conserva-nazis” really doesn’t help anything.
Having opinions and positions on issues is great. Having an opinion that you think is a fact is just tiring for everyone else that doesn’t share your opinion. Having an opinion based on incorrect information about the other side that leads you to call the other side names is pathetic. If you don’t know the other side well enough to get their perspective correct, then your opinion is pretty worthless because it is built on a false foundation. Stop calling your misunderstandings “just the truth!”
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