Knowing: Still Only Half the Battle

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On showing receipts. Plus: Build the wall? Not if you need a filling. And an obit goes awry.

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"Write what you know" is one of those adages doled out frequently to struggling novelists, even though many great authors think it's terrible advice (Toni Morrison: "You don't know anything"; Ken Kesey: "What you know is dull").

Now, I don't write fiction, so I can't really say. But I have seen "write what you know" work for journalists -- that is, when they weave discrete, known facts into a coherent, compelling whole.

Take this recent example from the New York Times, a Charlie Savage piece headlined "New Reports on Russian Interference Don't Show What Trump Says They Do." Savage delved into allegations from President Trump and DNI Tulsi Gabbard that President Obama had conspired with his deputies to gin up false conspiracies around Russian interference with the 2016 election. Savage, who has been covering national security most of his career, noted that while a few bits of fresh information came out of Trump's crusade, most of the claims were "overheated" and "wildly overstated." Then he dissected and eviscerated Trump's allegations, bit by bit. Did Savage's piece break a lot of new ground? Not really. Readers who have been following every development in the Russia investigation since 2016 wouldn't learn much new. But that's the point: Most people don't follow most stories very closely. So they can learn a lot when an experienced beat reporter helps them sort out what's important and what's chaff.

There's a corollary to this, which is writing about what our readers think they know. That came to mind when I read this recent post by Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor at Howard University School of Law. She, like many of us, becomes exasperated by people who say they "are not surprised" by a revelation of wrongdoing: "Please. You have no idea how tiresome it is when you post that something horrible, fascist, authoritarian is 'not surprising,'" Ifill wrote. "Nothing is 'surprising' anymore. But a lot of it is horrible and frightening. Let's deal with it together."

Ifill's comment is something journalists should take into account. There are a lot of things that people sense are wrong or corrupt, but they don't really understand the depth or breadth of it until reporters do the hard work of proving it. We all "knew" that wealthy people concoct complex ways to lower taxes, but until ProPublica revealed and explained the tax returns of several billionaires, we didn't really understand how people like Jeff Bezos and Carl Icahn had manipulated the system. Similarly, many of us "knew" that Elon Musk's DOGE was halting a lot of federal spending, and was not just -- as it claimed -- advising agencies on how to cut costs. But when Lawfare's Anna Bower dug into court filings a few months ago, she showed how Musk's acolytes, including a former Tesla employee, were actively canceling contracts, not simply offering budget tips. As Bower noted in a thread related to Ifill's post, that story is "an example of how journalism (and court records) can be used to 'prove' something that's an open secret. When it published, people were like 'but we already knew that.' Ok, that wasn't the point! The point was proving it."

On Monday, I asked Ifill if she had any further thoughts. She did. "Many journalists have internalized 'Why are you surprised?' It's why Trump accusing former president Obama of treason...appeared on page A14 of the New York Times the next day, rather than on the front page," she said, adding that "journalists and their outlets have played a big role" in inuring our readers to calamitous developments.

It would be hard to make this week's Midtown Manhattan shooting any more devastating. But Fortune found a way.

Among the four murder victims in Monday's rampage was Wesley LePatner, a top real estate executive at Blackstone Inc. and a forty-three-year-old mother of two. On Tuesday, Fortune ran a bizarre, disrespectful, and mercifully short obituary about LePatner.

Under the unfortunate subhead "FORTUNE INTELLIGENCE," the obituary:

* misstated LePatner's age;

* put the gunman's name into the lede;

* included a graf about his football injury;

* linked to a New York congressman's tweet, without offering evidence the two knew each other;

* published this photo caption: "An image of Wesley LePatner";

* and added this line, which is reprinted here verbatim: He honored her sense of civics, as a ".

The most informative part of the obit is the editor's note at the end: "For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing."

Just to be clear: anyone who uses AI to compose my obituary will see me reincarnated as an immortal skunk who will give you, your children, and your children's children not a single moment of peace.

A couple of laurels to stories that take us a few steps from the grim proceedings of recent days:

* David Bauer, a journalist in Switzerland, had a great idea a few years ago. He'd ask the readers of his Weekly Filet site to answer a specific question about books they had read. The queries ranged from "What book makes you feel hopeful?" to "What book changed your perspective on something important?" This year he asked, "What's a book you wish you'd discovered sooner?" Altogether, forty-six people responded, and only two books -- -The Midnight Library and The Book of Gathering -- turned out to be duplicate choices. Some of the other nominees could, as Bauer put it, "unfairly land in the self-help aisle" (At the Existentialist Café), while others are "diving into history" (The Red Badge of Courage) or "meeting this moment in time" (The Plot Against America). Bauer's lists will give you plenty to read in what remains of this summer, and they also show how engaging your readers is one of the most powerful journalistic tools we have.

* Burkhard Bilger took his teeth, and his notebook, across the border to Los Algodones, which "has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred. It's known as Molar City." The town, which is near the intersecting borders of California, Arizona, and Mexico, attracts Americans who can't afford dental work back home, where insurance rarely covers the more expensive procedures. And as Bilger's New Yorker story makes clear, tourists can't escape the competition. Shouted one hawker: "You need a root canal? Twenty percent off!"

Hat tips to John Schwartz and Betsy Morais. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can't acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.

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