THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TRUTH

All editors know this: it's usually the small things that get us. We sit for hours with eye-wateringly expensive lawyers combing through every participle in the front-page investigation into iniquity at the highest levels of government. And when the writ arrives it's from someone aggrieved at the 15th paragraph of an unrelated piece on page 37. Blink and you'd have missed it. You did blink. You did miss it.

Journalists make mistakes. We all make them. Every single edition of every single newspaper or magazine contains errors. On good days (read, lucky days) they may only be minor slips of spelling or trifling fact. On less good days they may include significant mistakes of interpretation which cause no real harm.

And then there are the pit-of-the-stomach moments--hopefully rare--when things go badly wrong and you're confronted with a sharp, unpleasant reminder of the troubling power we journalists wield. In my wallet I carry around with me the best description of journalism I know. It was part of a speech by David Broder in 1978, when the wise old bird of The Washington Post was collecting a Pulitzer Prize:

"I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made... that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours... distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you... to read it in about an hour. If we labeled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected updated version..."

Whenever I quote that passage to an audience of journalists there is always a smile of recognition. "That," they nod--sometimes with a degree of relief at finding it articulated at last--"that is what we do." But, of course, it's not the story we tell. In our dealings with the world at large we profess to tell the unvarnished truth, and nothing but.

For as long as we were in control there was small chance of being found out in our slips, and an even smaller question of being required to do anything about it. But--as has begun to dawn on even the most technophobic journalists--we're no longer in control. At least 10 million people a month now read The Guardian. That's 10 million fact checkers, every one of them with the potential to broadcast our failings as broadly as they like.

And they do. Our response has been to set up an independent readers' editor with his own space to clarify, correct--and comment on--things we get wrong. It's not perfect. It is a start. My sense is we're going to have to go much further in opening up our processes if we're to retain the trust of present readers and to win the trust of future generations. The dismaying thing is the timing of all this. The crisis in trust has coincided--with a great many newspaper and media companies--with troubled times in revenue, circulation and audience. And it is also happening at a time when good, reliable, serious, challenging journalism is needed as rarely before.

A few months ago I attended a select off-the-record gathering of M.P.s, judges, spies and civil servants to discuss the lessons of the Iraq war. Actually, the meeting was more narrowly focused on the Hutton report into the BBC's infamous coverage of one aspect of the war. The distinguished participants around the table owned up to failure--a failure to hold the executive accountable, to operate as proper checks and balances. The only people who had done their duty (said the spooks and the judges and the mandarins) were the media. They had made mistakes, certainly, but they had got something out into open which deserved to be.

What was true then has been as true since. It wasn't Parliament that flushed out the hurried and mysterious changes in the British Attorney General's advice on the legality of war: it was the media. The prime minister struggled to the bitter end to keep it all secret. Since the formal end of the war there have been numerous journalistic postmortems on both sides of the Atlantic. Editors have been fired, errant reporters have resigned or been publicly criticized. The BBC was unceremoniously decapitated. The politicians and their unelected helpers remain serenely in place.

At some level the public recognizes the importance of decent, robust journalism, even if there is currently a drifting away from large swathes of the mainstream media. It's probably also true that most of the public are a bit more sophisticated than we are in understanding the limits of what we do. Maybe it's time we took Broder's advice. Let's advertise the fact that journalism is a partial, hasty, incomplete and flawed business. The readers know it. They might trust us more, not less, if we owned up.