“Your job is to just report the news.” I get messages like that from readers about once a week. They complain about our opinion content or a slant to our reporting – never with clear examples -- and say all they want are the facts. Seeing the world in such clear black-and-white terms must be wonderful, but the complainers could not be more wrong. Our duty is to the truth, and getting at the truth these days requires innovation and the tossing of some journalistic traditions. For decades, the convention in journalism was to report a news event by talking to and quoting newsmakers. The convention was based on everyone acting in good faith. Sure, politicians would exaggerate or use a lot of spin in those quaint days of yore, but they generally were truthful. Quoting them helped readers understand the news. That’s changed. Today, politicians lie. All. The. Time. They’ve incinerated the integrity, character and good faith that once marked public service and replaced it with self-interest, culture wars and a quest for everlasting power. They’ve learned that lying to reporters is a remarkably effective way to dupe the masses, using the media’s massive reach to spread their messages for free. (I wrote a column last year about a terrific book on the trend called Beyond the Big Lie by Politifact founder Bill Adair.) Our duty is to ensure the audience for our platforms gets the truth, and often that means calling out the politicians’ lies. For an example, consider the Ohio Statehouse battle over paying for professional sports stadiums. Gov. Mike DeWine proposes doubling the tax on sports betting companies to 40 percent, which would still be lower than some states. It makes sense. Those companies have zero investment in the state but rake in billions of our dollars. DeWine figures that because their revenue is based on sports, they should help pay for venues where those sports are played. The Ohio House refused to do it. They lie, saying that raising the tax would cost Ohioans, but that’s an absolute falsehood. Betting odds are not changed state to state. No Ohioan would pay that tax. You have to wonder about the real motive for legislators to protect sports betting companies, and I hope the U.S. Justice Department is watching, but the point is that they blatantly lie about the ramifications of raising that tax. Or consider the nonsense that Statehouse politicians peddled in passing state Sen. Jerry Cirino’s higher education bill. They began with the silly premise that college campuses have become hotbeds of liberalism hostile to anyone with a conservative viewpoint. When have college campuses not been liberal? The people who attend college are young, and young people often are liberal. Their politics change as they age. But with their silly premise that campuses “indoctrinate” youth into dangerous liberal thinking – because our college students are too stupid and impressionable to think for themselves -- lawmakers adopted a bill that could destroy the value of degrees from state universities. Professors, knowing their job security is based on student reviews, will give everyone top grades, even those who don’t do the work to earn them. Professors will be required to entertain any hare-brained idea students want to offer. Flat earthers. Holocaust deniers. You name the ridiculous conspiracy, and it will have a place on Ohio campuses. Do you think our best students will still attend? Do you think the best professors will remain? Of course not. But the Statehouse politicians babbled nonsense in passing it as part of their culture wars to divide us. We covered the Cirino bill with dozens of stories, making sure readers understood the full ramifications. Unlike the lawmakers, we focused on truth. When a legislator told us nonsense, we made clear it was nonsense. A prime vehicle for us is our popular podcast, Today in Ohio. Each weekday, four journalists from our newsroom discuss news stories but also call out the nonsense. We go behind the news to explain motivations of leaders who so obviously work against the best interest of their constituents. Overstated? Hardly. The Ohio Legislature has protected tobacco companies at the expense of children, electric utilities at the expense of ratepayers, sports betting companies t the expense of taxpayers, gas-and-oil drillers at the expense of parks and preserves, and private schools at the expense of taxpayer-funded public schools. We don’t just pillory Republican bloviators. We also call out the Democrats who run Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. We’ve been all over them for their antics, especially the county council, which squandered $66 million on slush funds and now has a financial crisis on their hands. If we see buffoonery at any level of government, with any political party, we call it out. We see a lot of buffoonery. We can see from our metrics that readers appreciate out effort. Thousands write to us each month in texts and emails, often thanking us for our diligence. Over the past month, we’ve greatly expanded the reach of our truth-telling, by converting audio conversations about news stories on Today in Ohio into text stories on our website. Those stories racked up more than a half million views in less than a month after we started them. A lot more people are seeing truth instead of spin. Just report the facts? That’s gibberish. Truth is what matters. We pursue the truth. I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com Thanks for reading. | 