The Truth and the Media

   I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I could string two or three words together to make a sentence. When I went off to college, that was still what I wanted to do, but to declare your major as “writing” causes your advisor to look down her nose at you. So, instead, I went with Mass Communications, thinking that I would fall somewhere in between journalism and advertising, thinking that I could put a creative spin on news stories, or something like that and eventually turn to fiction. When it came down to it, I disliked most of those classes and couldn’t imagine doing any of those things for a living.

That being said, I still came away from those three and a half years of higher education with a respect for people who worked in the field of sharing the news.

And what about today? I think that those journalists and news broadcasters are all still doing their job, it’s just the world we live in, the world that someone with an agenda created so that we end up hearing only one side of the story.

The big news items these days – the Coronavirus pandemic and the killing of George Floyd. I shouldn’t have to tell you that both these news stories have run the gamut from fact to sensationalism.

Why is that? Coz that’s what the public wants to hear about and read about, and where the truth lies, I cannot make a guess.

One of the main themes in my novel, “The Truth Beyond the River”, is right in its title. The Truth.

Teresa, the main character, is tasked with finding the truth in the story she is covering. As much as she wants to dig to the bottom of things and share that truth, it turns out to be much more difficult than she realized. And in the end, because we never actually read the article she wrote (because I never got that degree in journalism), we are left wondering what truth she reported.

Every story does have two sides – well, don’t we wish it was that easy. Every story actually has as many sides to it as there are people who lived it.

I’m just sharing this as another way of saying that “The Truth Beyond the River” is relevant to our current lives in this one more way. You’ll have to read the book to figure it out. (Maybe I did learn something in those advertising and marketing classes. 😉)

(I also took the picture above when I was a freshman in college. At the time, it was just another goofy, meaningless still-life, but looking at it now, I guess it does tell a story.)