I majored in philosophy at Georgetown because I was planning to go to law school.

That was the plan through high school and into college, and what held me was a question two men had been arguing about since before I got there.

Legal philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment. Imagine you are designing the rules of a society before you know who you will be in it. You do not know your wealth, your race, your family, your health, your talents. He called it “the veil of ignorance,” and the logic is simple enough that a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student can feel it land. Since you might turn out to be the least fortunate person in the place you are designing, you will write rules that are survivable for that person. Whatever “shoes you are born into,” you get a fair chance.

Philosopher Robert Nozick thought that was wrong, and said so.

His argument was that people own themselves, that rights are not goals to be maximized but boundaries that cannot be crossed, and that a state which redistributes what one person earned in order to improve another person’s position has crossed one. He was not indifferent to the poor. He believed the arrangement Rawls described could not be built without taking something from somebody who had not agreed to give it.

Two serious men, working carefully, reaching opposite conclusions about the same question. I found that thrilling. I still do.

And I notice now, forty years later, what it was I actually fell in love with at twenty. It was not either answer. It was the argument.

Then I did not go on to law school, as I had originally intended. Instead, I went into journalism — following in my father’s footsteps, to some degree — and I have been in that field for forty years now, with a slight pivot into the field of public relations, and I have never regretted it.

My son Eric is in his second year of law school at Emory Law School in Atlanta. He is “building the thing properly,” the way you are supposed to and the way most students do not quite manage. Cultivating relationships with his professors, as they co-author articles for the law review. Arranging to attend a professional conference, where he has been asked to speak. He is certainly further along at his age than I was at mine.

I mention all of that because of something a lawyer said to me last month, and because of how I heard it.

• • •

Larry Bridgesmith teaches at Vanderbilt Law School, where he coordinates the Program on Law and Innovation. He teaches at Arizona State as well, and was named the school’s Teacher of the Year. He chaired the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Commission. Before all of that, he was a managing partner at a national firm for twenty years, litigating labor and employment cases.

Richard Schreiber and I recently invited him to join us on our podcast, “True Journalism.”

Larry has a book coming out soon, and he is careful to say it is not a memoir. His description is that it is a journey in understanding how influencing other minds can best take place.

And he told us where the journey started.

Fresh out of law school, in his words, full of vim and vigor, walking into court believing that all he had to do was out-argue the other side and it was his.

Then the thought that Larry shared with us which I have not stopped thinking about since.

“That coercive influence is something law school teaches you,” he said, “but it does not change anybody’s mind.”

• • •

I want to be careful with that, because it is not a complaint about law school and Larry did not offer it as one.

Law school teaches you to construct an argument that holds under pressure, and a person who cannot do that is no use to a client. It is the right thing to teach first. Larry learned it, used it for twenty years, and built a substantial career on it.

What he is describing is the thing that comes after, and the fact that nobody hands it to you. Some people go looking for it. Most do not.

He went looking, and what he found was a mechanism.

• • •

The reference he reached for is Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman described two systems. One is fast, automatic and largely unconscious, running on intuition and emotion. The other is slow, deliberate and effortful. The first handles the overwhelming majority of what we decide. The second gets involved only when the first cannot cope, and it is expensive to run, so we avoid it.

The implication is the part that should keep those of us in the field of journalism alert and awake. Information and persuasion rarely change behavior, Kahneman wrote, because most decisions never reach the deliberate system at all.

Larry puts it in his own terms, which are more physical than Kahneman’s. He talks about the subcognitive brain, the amygdala and the hypothalamus, emotionally driven and shaped by experience, operating orders of magnitude faster than the executive function. Under any sense of risk, it takes over by default.

So the work, as he describes it, is to slow that down. Not to win. To help a person put a halt on the speed of the fast brain long enough that a second possibility can get in the door.

And then the line that I think is the best thing either of us said in that hour, and it was him.

“What is true for one person,” he reminded us, “may not be true for another. Not because it is not true, but because they cannot accept it as true.”

• • •

Here is the part that stopped being about law.

Journalism and law teach the same skill.

Marshal the evidence. Build the case. Anticipate the counterargument and dispose of it. Out-argue the other side and it is yours. We do not call it that, we call it rigor, and it is the right thing to teach first for exactly the same reason.

And it changes almost nobody’s mind.

Last month, I wrote about a friend of mine, an investigative reporter with a serious record, who is certain about things I do not believe are true. I said then that I was not going to send him a study, because he has read studies and knows how to read them better than I do.

At the time, I did not have language for why that was true — but Larry gave it to me. I would be arguing with the slow part of a man whose fast part had already settled the question, and the fast part is not persuaded by citations. It is shaped by experience, and his experience of institutions like mine is that we have been confidently wrong in front of him more than once.

That is not a reason to stop reporting. It is a reason to stop mistaking a well-built argument for a completed job.

• • •

Larry’s alternative is not softness, by the way — so don’t misconstrue what I’m saying here.

He spends his time as a mediator, which he distinguishes carefully from those we encounter in the courtroom. An arbitrator can render judgment. A judge can tell the parties what has to happen. A mediator, however, has none of that power. All he can do is help people in conflict understand how the thing might look in a different light.

That is harder than winning, not easier. Winning has a scoreboard; this does not.

And it runs against the current of his own training, Larry told us, which is the point. He had to work out, over years, how to influence people to see more clearly without being coercive, and that process of “working-it-out” is the focus of his soon-to-be-released book.

• • •

There is one more thing I want to mention, and it is why I am writing this down for my son rather than just telling him at Thanksgiving.

Near the end of our conversation, Richard said to Larry that he could have finished a distinguished career in a courtroom and nobody would have asked more of him, and that instead he went and did something else.

Larry answered without hesitating.

“That is what I hope to see, somehow,” he told us, “on my tombstone — to pursue justice.”

Not to have won. Not to have prevailed. To have pursued.

That is a lawyer at the end of a long career telling you what turned out to matter, and it is not the thing anyone hands you in the first year.

• • •

So I am not warning my son Eric about anything. He is in exactly the right place, learning exactly the right thing first, and doing it better than I did anything at that age. I’m proud of him.

What I would want him to have is the second part —the one that Larry described — earlier than most people get it, the understanding that the argument is the tool and not the work. That a person who does not accept what you have proven is not necessarily being stupid or dishonest, and is more likely running on a system that never received your proof. That the skill worth building after the first one is the ability to slow somebody down long enough to look again.

And that when it is all finished and somebody has to put a few words on a stone, the word that holds up is “pursued.”

• • •

At the age of twenty, when I faced that “fork in the road” when contemplating my future, one path leading into the legal profession and one path leading into the field of journalism, I chose the latter.

I did not know then that both of those paths are about the same thing, which is finding out what happened and making somebody answer for it.

My son Eric will spend his career doing that in a courtroom. I have spent mine doing it in the arena of journalism.

He will do it with a case. I do it with a story.

Neither of us gets to stop at the argument.

You’ll find the full video version of our interview with Larry Bridgesmith here, on Substack. Larry Bridgesmith appeared on “True Journalism,” the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

You can listen to the audio version of this podcast episode here, on Spotify.

There was a rumor going around on TikTok that Helen Keller never existed.

My friend Michele Mitchell asked her nieces about it. The older one said she believed it, because it did not make sense that one person could have accomplished all of that.

Michele told her that she did. That we know this.

And her niece asked, “How do you know, Aunt Shelly? Were you there?”

• • •

I want to defend that question before I take it apart.

It is not a stupid question, of course. It is the honest position of a generation that has watched enough manufactured video to conclude that anything arriving secondhand is worth roughly nothing. They are not refusing to think; they are applying a standard, and the standard is that testimony you cannot trace to a witness does not count.

That standard is too strict to run a civilization on. Almost everything any of us knows arrived secondhand.

It is also, and this is the part that stopped me, very close to the strictest rule in my own profession.

• • •

My friend Michele Mitchell has been a working journalist for thirty years. She was a political anchor at CNN Headline News. She reported for Bill Moyers at PBS. She has also filed stories from Afghanistan, India, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco. My colleague Richard Schreiber and I recently welcomed her to our podcast, “True Journalism,” for an interview.

These days, Michele describes her method as “responsibly rogue,” a term she came up with because she left institutional television without wanting to leave its rules behind.

She told us she has started putting herself into her own films on purpose — not for vanity, but because she wants the audience knows she was actually there, physically, in the place being shown, because in her judgment that is now the only thing that authenticates anything.

Indeed, she says that we now seem to find ourselves in a world in which truth and authenticity are “luxury items.”

As one who has been a journalist and media strategist for forty years, I felt the impact of her observation. Being there used to be the credential; in fact, it was the whole job. As a jourtnalist, you went, you looked, you came back and shared the story. Now a nineteen-year-old can look at a man who was in the room and quite reasonably say, “Prove it!”

• • •

I keep returning to this thought, as it is not a new challenge. Somebody already solved this. They were not journalists, and they did it almost thirty years ago.

Michele’s powerful and award-winning documentary “The Uncondemned” focuses on the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of a small Rwandan town called Taba. He was not a high-profile politician. He was a middle figure, an ordinary man with authority over one place. During the genocide, women and girls were raped in and around the compound where his office stood, and he knew, and he allowed it.

Rape had never before been prosecuted as an act of genocide. It was listed as a possible criterion, and it had never once been charged.

The case against Jean-Paul Akayesu was built by a legal team of fifteen people from eleven countries, working with almost nothing. There is a photograph in the film of one of the lawyers at an empty desk. One of the prosecutors describes a meeting held to decide how the office’s last stack of paper should be used.

And it was built on the testimony of women from Taba, who flew from villages that did not have running water to a courtroom in another country to describe what had been done to them, in public, to a panel of judges.

One of the lawyers on that team, Patricia Sellers, remembered the thing those women said to each other before they went in.

They would speak their truth. They would say only what they saw, and not what they had heard. And they would do it for justice, not revenge.

• • •

Read that again as a rule of evidence, because that is what it is.

They would share their firsthand experience, only. Not what they were told. Not what everyone in the camp knew. Not the thing they feel certain must be true because someone they trust said it happened.

Only what they saw.

I have worked with correspondents and producers my whole adult life, and I am telling you that this is the hardest discipline in the trade. The first half is easy enough to say. The second half, the refusal to repeat something you heard and believe, is where almost everyone fails, including me, including people much better at this than me.

These women were not trained. Nobody sent them to a seminar. They worked it out on their own, standing outside a courtroom, because they understood something about their own credibility that a great many professionals never work out at all.

If they said one thing they could not personally account for, the whole account could be broken. And it was not only their account. It was the first one.

On September 2, 1998, Akayesu was convicted of genocide and of crimes against humanity including rape. It was the first conviction of its kind anywhere, and it stands as the model every case of its type has been built on since.

It stands because of a rule some village women made up for themselves about what they were willing to say, and what they would not say.

• • •

That standard turns out to be my friend Michele’s method too, and you can watch her apply it to something as unglamorous as money.

After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, half of all American households contributed to help relieve the suffering of the people there — approximately 1.4 billion dollars from private donors.

The reporting started with a detail almost nobody would have caught. Michele was taking French lessons. Her teacher was Haitian and had just come back from Port-au-Prince, and mentioned that conditions had not changed and that there were traffic jams now, of big white trucks.

Michele had seen that before. In war zones, in poor places, on several continents. Traffic jams of big white vehicles, and she wondered, why is this happening again?

So, in November of 2010, she went to see for herself, and she walked more than a hundred camps.

Then she went back to Haiti ten months later, after the organizations had told her they were spending the money, and she walked the same camps again.

That second walk made a powerful impact on her. She did not report that “sources tell us that conditions have worsened.” Instead, she went and looked for herself, twice, with her own eyes, ten months apart, in the same places. As a result, she found that conditions had indeed gotten worse. She found that thousands of people were sharing a handful of toilets. One camp did not even have any soap or water, another camp desperately needed food and was instead given condoms. In one location in Port-au-Prince, Michele found a found a filthy camp filled with suffering men, women, and children, and on the other side of the street, posh restaurants where she read a wine list into the camera.

The American Red Cross called Michele’s documentary “inaccurate,” yet it won the National Edward R. Murrow Award for best television documentary, and it has aired more than a thousand times on public television.

The reason the documentary did not vanish but instead was seen by millions of viewers is not (simply) because Michele is brave, though she is. Instead, more importantly, she could account for every frame firsthand. She has been there herself as a firsthand witness, twice.

Also, it is worth noting that Michelle did not conclude that people should stop giving, to help relieve the suffering. Instead, she named the organizations that were providing relief effectively and responsibly, the way donors deserved, including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders. She said what made these organizations different is that they investigate themselves and openly publish their own mistakes. In fact, Michele says that still gives her own money to these organizations; she just does more research before she writes the check.

• • •

Currently, Michele is making a film called, “OG: The Right Side of History, Wrong Side of the Law,” about early cannabis growers, people who, for decades, were deemed to be criminals under laws that have since changed.

That is the same argument from the other end. The only reason anybody can tell that story is that somebody recorded it while it was happening.

One more thing about her powerful documentary “The Uncondemned” has stuck with me.

In the last scene of the film, we see three former militiamen, accused of a staggering number of rapes across the border in the Congo. Michele asks them whether they had used rape as a tactic of war. They remain silent, each one looking the others — and the film ends there, on the silence.

The courageous women said what they saw; the men said nothing.

Only one of those is on the record, and it will be on the record permanently, and that is the entire reason the standard exists.

• • •

Getting back to Michele’s skeptical niece. Unfortunately, I don’t have a neat, acceptable answer for her.

As much as I might like to, I can’t prove that I was in most of the rooms I was in. Neither can most other journalists of my era. That era is over and it is not coming back, and pretending otherwise is not useful to a skeptical nineteen-year-old asking a very legitimate and important question, after being deceived by “screens” her entire life.

What I can tell her, however, is that the question she asked is a good one, and that it does have an answer — an answer worked out by courageous women in a Rwandan village who had every reason, in response to their outrageous and inhumane torment, to say more than they could prove. Yet, they did not.

Instead, they exemplified an important standard that we can all follow: “Say what you saw; do not say what you heard.”

Taking this courageous stand was enough to convict a man for outragous offenses which no one had ever previously been convicted of. This standard will also apply to many other, smaller transgressions, as well. As journalists, and as those who sincerely seek the truth, we owe them our gratitude.

Listen to the full conversation. Michele Mitchell appeared on Episode 13 of “True Journalism,” the podcast series I co-host with my colleague Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video version of this episode here on Substack.

And listen to the audio version of this podcast here on Spotify.

“The Uncondemned” and “Haiti: Where Did the Money Go?” are both available for viewing online. Michele’s current film on the early cannabis growers is in production.

I bumped a friend from our podcast last month.

He is a working investigative reporter with a long record. He and I worked together at a network morning program in the early 2000s, where he was the correspondent who went after the story nobody wanted to hand him. He has spent a career refusing to take an official statement at face value. Hand him a government press release and he starts looking for what it leaves out before he finishes the first paragraph.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, he and I were on the road together in another state, working a story with a camera crew.

I remember being glad it was him. He had a kind of “commando temperament,” which is not always an asset in a person and is very often an asset in an investigative reporter. When everything came apart that morning, he was steady.

So this is not a stranger, and it is not somebody whose judgment I have reason to dismiss.

• • •

We spoke by phone late last month, catching up after many months. It was a good call until it was a hard one.

He is certain about things I do not believe are true. Most of it concerns the COVID vaccines, and he is not tentative about it. He believes that a great many people are going to be seriously harmed, and that the harm is still coming, and that the institutions responsible know.

He is not making it up. He is not lying to me.

That is what makes it difficult.

If the people who disagreed with us were all cynics, this would be an easy job. You could sort them by motive. You could say that one is selling something, that one is angry, that one is not arguing in good faith, and then you could go back to work.

I wrote to him afterward and said we should not proceed with the recording. I told him the truth, which is that I respect his passion and that the material pushes past the parameters Richard Schreiber and I have set for the show. I apologized. I said I understood he might be angry.

He wrote back the same evening.

He was not angry. He said so plainly, and I believe him. He said he was sad, because he thinks the harm will go on for years and reach millions of people.

He also said something I have not been able to put down. If you want to do a journalism show, you have to get into uncomfortable topics. And: I can source and back up every single thing I say.

• • •

I want to take that seriously rather than wave at it, because the first half is correct.

A program that only takes up subjects where the answer is comfortable is not doing the work. He is right about that, and he has been right about it his whole career.

The second half is where we part, and the distinction is narrow enough that I want to state it carefully.

Sourcing is not the same as weighing. You can source almost any proposition. There is a study, a preprint, a credentialed dissenter, a document. What you cannot do by sourcing is establish what the whole body of evidence supports, because that requires deciding which sources carry weight and why, and that decision is the actual work.

Two people can both be sourcing honestly and end up in different countries.

• • •

Now the part that belongs to my profession rather than to my friend.

There is a difference between a question that is genuinely open and a question that is settled but unpopular.

Whether vaccines cause autism is not open. It has been examined repeatedly, across enormous populations, over more than two decades, and the answer has not moved. That a person holding high office argued otherwise for years does not reopen it. Position is not evidence.

But some questions in that same area were genuinely open, and a few still are. How long protection lasts. Myocarditis risk in young men. Whether particular mandates were wise, and where, and for how long.

Those were open. A great many of us treated them as closed.

When you defend the settled and the unsettled with the same certainty, and one of them later shifts, you have taught your audience that you cannot tell the difference.

And then they stop trusting you on the settled one too.

That is not a failure of facts. Every individual claim could be sourced. It is a failure of calibration, which is subtler and more damaging, because it does not feel like an error while you are making it. It feels like conviction.

I do not think my friend arrived where he is because somebody fooled him. I think he watched people in my line of work speak with total confidence and then quietly revise, more than once, and drew a conclusion about our reliability that he now applies to everything we say.

That conclusion is too broad. It is also not unearned.

• • •

So where is the line.

Richard put the objection to me directly when we recorded, and it is the right objection. Treating every claim as provisional gives bad actors an opening. False balance has done its own damage. If everything is arguable, nothing can be established.

The line is the record. Not the volume of the claim. Not the credentials of the person making it. Not how many people share it.

Which brings me to Scarlett Lewis.

• • •

Scarlett is a friend, from Connecticut. On December 14, 2012, her six-year-old son Jesse was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, along with nineteen other first graders and six educators.

For years afterward, Alex Jones told his audience it never happened. A hoax. A false flag. The parents were actors.

In the summer of 2022, in a courtroom in Austin, Texas, Scarlett sat on the witness stand a few feet from him and said she wanted to tell him to his face, because she wanted him to know that she is a mother first and foremost, and that she knows he is a father, and that her son existed.

Then she said the thing I keep coming back to.

Truth is vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on. And we have to agree on that to have a civil society.

She was not making an argument about media literacy. She was a mother in a courtroom explaining to the man who had denied her child’s existence why it mattered that he stop.

During that trial Alex Jones took the stand and conceded that Sandy Hook was one hundred percent real, and that he had been wrong to lie about it.

The jury awarded Scarlett and Jesse’s father more than four million dollars in compensatory damages, and added more than forty-five million in punitive damages on top of it.

That is what happens when belief meets the record in a room where somebody has the authority to require an answer. Almost nowhere else has that authority. Not a podcast. Not a newspaper. Not a comment section.

• • •

I need to add something, because it happened while I was writing this.

On August 21 a Texas appeals court cut that judgment. The four million in compensatory damages stands. The forty-five million in punitive damages came down to one and a half million, to comply with a state cap of seven hundred fifty thousand dollars per plaintiff. The court held that the parents had not shown the harassment reached a level that would justify exceeding the cap, and that the trial judge should not have let them seek more after the verdict.

About six million dollars, in place of fifty.

Jones called it a gigantic victory for the First Amendment. Their attorney called the ruling irrelevant, pointing out that it touches two claims out of nineteen and that Jones still faces more than a billion dollars in Connecticut, where a separate judgment stands.

I could have left that out. I wrote the earlier paragraph three weeks ago with the fifty million figure in it, and almost nobody would have caught it.

But this essay is about people who state a number with confidence and quietly revise it later, so leaving it out was never available to me.

• • •

Here is what the appeals court did not touch, and could not.

He said it under oath. Sandy Hook was one hundred percent real, and he had been wrong to lie about it. No court reduced that. No court can. The money was always appealable and everyone involved knew it. The admission is permanent.

The record is stubborn. It is just slower than the claim.

• • •

I have been doing this for forty years and I do not have a method for my friend.

I am not going to send him a study. He has read studies. He knows how to read them, probably better than I do, and he has already decided which institutions produce them and what those institutions are worth.

He believes I am keeping something from our audience. I believe I am exercising judgment. Both of those can be said in good faith, and only one of us can be right, and the uncomfortable part is that neither of us gets to settle it by insisting.

What I have is a narrower obligation, and it runs in my direction rather than his.

Be able to say which is which. When something is settled, say so and show why. When something is open, say that it is open, out loud, at the time, and not two years later when it has moved and everybody can see that it moved.

That costs something. It is less satisfying than certainty, and it gives ground to people arguing in bad faith, and Richard is right that they will take it.

But the alternative is what we already did, and we are living in the result.

Scarlett Lewis had it right, sitting in that courtroom, speaking to a man who had spent years insisting her son was invented. We have to agree on it to have a civil society.

We are not going to agree on much. That is fine, and it always was.

We have to be able to agree on what is on the record.

I hope my friend and I still can. I am not certain we can, and I am not willing to pretend otherwise, because pretending is how we got here.

Listen to the full conversation. This essay draws on Episode 21 of True Journalism, the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber. No guest this week, just the two of us.

Watch the video episode on Substack here.

Listen to the audio version of this episode on Spotify here.

Scarlett Lewis founded the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, which brings social and emotional learning into schools. chooselovemovement.org

# # # #

Katya Soldak grew up inside Soviet propaganda. She was a child in Kharkiv at the end of the USSR, in a system where the party line was the only line and almost nobody could reach an alternative account of anything.

She says the information environment we are living in now is worse.

Not more dangerous. Worse as an information environment. I asked her to explain that, because it is not what I expected to hear.

Her answer was structural. Under the Soviets there was one story, and everyone got the same one. Seventy years of it, and the entire population was, more or less, on the same page. When the Iron Curtain came down, it came down for everybody at once.

What we have instead is a great many small channels, each feeding a person deeper into whatever that person already believes. Her way of putting it: two people with virtually the same profile now live in completely different universes.

One lie that everyone shares can be corrected. A million lies, each tailored to one person, cannot be.

• • •

Katya is the editorial director of Forbes Media’s international editions. She worked at CBS News before Forbes, took a master’s at the Columbia journalism school, and got her start in the 1990s at one of the first independent television stations in Ukraine. She directed the documentary “The Long Breakup.” Richard Schreiber and I recently interviewed her for our podcast, “True Journalism.”

I have known her for years. We used to have coffee, back when the documentary was still an idea she was describing to me rather than a film. She wanted to show what had happened to the people in her hometown across a decade, how they had changed. The film came out in 2020. In February of 2022 the full invasion began, and a film about Ukrainian identity stopped being a personal project and became something universities needed.

So, I want to be honest about my bias here. I am writing about a friend.

But the thing I want to tell you about is not the war. It is a decision she made in 2017, before any of this, and what happened to it afterward.

• • •

That December, marking the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution, she published a piece in Forbes called “This Is How Propaganda Works: A Look Inside A Soviet Childhood.”

She was not the obvious person to write it. That is her own assessment, and she considers it the reason it worked.

The writers producing English-language work on the Soviet Union had mostly grown up in the West, so they had studied it rather than lived in it. The writers who had come from there and were publishing in English tended to be younger, born close enough to the end that the thing itself was already over.

Almost nobody was old enough to remember being a Soviet child and, also, writing about it in English. She was.

And she had never studied international relations.

She counts that as an advantage, which stopped me when she said it. She had not absorbed the analysts’ vocabulary. Nobody had handed her the standard phrases for describing what she had lived through. So she had no choice except to write from memory and from the heart.

Here is what that produced. People across every ideology could read it without being irritated. The skeptics did not put it down deciding she was on a mission. Nobody finished it convinced they had just been handed another piece of propaganda about propaganda.

Her explanation is one sentence. The memory of a child is not tainted by any agenda.

Nine years later it remains one of the most-read pieces she has written. It is cited in research papers and dissertations. Her word for it is evergreen.

• • •

I have spent forty years around people who are very good with words, and I want to say plainly what that sentence cost me to hear.

The professional vocabulary is the thing we are all trained toward. It is how you signal that you belong in the room. It is faster, it is defensible, and every one of us reaches for it under deadline. I have written that way and I have accepted copy written that way and never once flagged it.

And it is the reason so much of what we produce is forgotten by Thursday.

The vocabulary is a kind of armor. It protects the writer. It also announces, in the first paragraph, exactly which side the writer is on, which tells a reader who disagrees that this piece was not written for them. They stop. They were right to stop.

What Katya did instead was describe a childhood. The rituals, the songs, the things a child was told and believed. She made no argument. She did not need one. A reader supplies the argument themselves, which is the only way anyone has ever actually changed a mind.

• • •

She says the same thing about film, and she has the evidence for it.

She has published a news digest about Ukraine every day since the invasion began, and she is not about to stop. It is the record, kept current, by someone who goes back to Kharkiv and Kyiv twice a year so that she knows what she is writing about.

What she pointed out is that the two things do different jobs, and only one of them stays.

“The Long Breakup” sits in the libraries at Princeton and NYU. She still gets email from nineteen and twenty-year-olds who watched it and finally understood what had led up to the war. Those students were children when the events in that film took place. The news cycle is very short, in her phrase. Things appear and then they simply disappear. A film does not have to survive the cycle, because it was never in it.

The film works because there is no “voice of God” in it. That is her term. She did not write narration explaining what her hometown meant. She filmed actual people over years and let them show how they changed between 2010 and 2014.

She is making a second one now, about life in Kharkiv during the war, twenty miles from the Russian border. One of the children in it was four years old when the fighting started and is eight now. Another was a teenager and is not one anymore.

She does not tell you what to conclude from that either.

• • •

I asked her what an ordinary person is supposed to do about an information environment she considers worse than the one she was raised in.

Her answers were practical and I would repeat all of them. Media literacy. Learning how to consume information rather than absorbing whatever arrives. Supporting the outlets that still fact-check, because somebody has to.

But the thing I keep returning to is not something she offered as advice at all. It is what she happened to do in 2017, and what happened to it afterward.

If you have something true to say and you are worried nobody will hear it, the temptation is to reach for the language of the people who get listened to. Borrow the framework. Cite the study. Sound like an expert.

The evidence suggests that is exactly backward.

The piece that outlasted all of it was written by a woman who did not have the vocabulary, about being a child, with nothing to prove.

Nine years on, people are still reading it.

Katya Soldak was featured on Episode 20 of “True Journalism,” the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode on Substack here.

Listen to the audio version of this episode on Spotify here.

Katya’s new documentary, “My Kharkiv: Fortress of Solitude,” is in post-production and accepting contributions.

Near the end of our conversation I asked Terence Smith what had led him into journalism.

He said he was born into it.

His father was Red Smith, who wrote Sports of the Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976, and had been on the cover of Newsweek years before that as the most widely read sportswriter in the world. More than two hundred and fifty papers carried his column.

Then Terry said something I had not known. Back in the sixties and seventies and into the eighties, all five working males in the Smith family, including his uncle and his cousin, were writing for New York City newspapers.

And then, almost as an afterthought, he added that one of the best of them was his female cousin.

Five men with bylines. The best of them was the one nobody was counting.

Hold on to that. I will come back to it.

• • •

I was born into it too.

My father was Ron Martin. He came out of Joplin, Missouri, went to journalism school at the University of Missouri, and started at small papers. He worked at the Detroit Free Press and the Baltimore News-American. He was managing editor at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and at the Miami Herald. In 1982 he became the first executive editor of USA TODAY, and he stayed seven years. After that he went to Atlanta and helped merge two newspapers into the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and then spent the middle of the nineties arguing that the paper had better be ready for the internet.

My mother, Vivian, went through the Missouri journalism program with him. So did a young man in their class named Van Gordon Sauter, who would go on to run CBS News, and who years later would be a considerable reason I ended up in the business myself.

Terry Smith spent twenty years at the New York Times, eight of them in the Middle East. He was in Jerusalem on the first day of the Six-Day War in 1967. He ran the Saigon bureau during Vietnam, the largest overseas bureau the paper had. He covered five presidents. He came to CBS News, where he and I worked together on Sunday Morning, and later he built the media criticism unit at the PBS NewsHour, which is one of the operations now caught up in the defunding of public broadcasting.

And after all of that, when asked how it started, he went back to his father.

• • •

Here is the part I am not proud of.

I never interviewed mine.

I had my whole life to do it. I was in the same profession. I knew exactly what questions to ask, because asking questions is what I did for a living for forty years. And I never once sat down with my father and asked him about the work.

He died in May of 2022, at eighty-four. My mother died nine months later.

So last year I called Van Sauter, who had known them both since they were students and who stayed close to each of them until the end. I told him I was writing about my father and asked what he remembered.

What I got was the interview I never conducted.

• • •

The word Van kept coming back to was curiosity.

My father was never off the job. That is Van’s phrase and it is exactly right. You would walk with him toward a movie and he would stop in front of a store window. Not glance at it. Stop, and stand there, and work out what he was looking at, while everyone else waited on the sidewalk.

He read as many as eight newspapers a day, and often a book on top of that. At his desk at the Free Press he would go through other people’s papers and magazines, tear out pages, and leave them on a reporter’s desk. Look at this. What do you think?

Van told me that as an editor my father sent people three-sentence notes about something he had noticed, always ending in the same question. “Is this a story?” He would send those to a reporter he had already assigned three stories to that week.

His way of communicating with his own children was not much different. A clipping. Later, a link. A movie review, a restaurant review, a thing he had seen.

I remember being about eight years old in Rochester and going to the corner store with him. There was some cheap toy on the candy counter, a little shooter that fired something through a straw. He looked at it and said it was alarming, that you could imagine what somebody might do with a thing like that, and that there was probably a story in it.

Van’s summary of him was one sentence. “To your father, the world was a story.”

A colleague of his at USA TODAY put the same thing a different way after he died. He was as interested in Elizabeth Taylor’s new perfume as he was in the troubles in the Middle East, and he gave the same attention to each.

• • •

But the thing I actually carry did not come from Van. It came from my father directly, and it is the only piece of professional instruction I can remember receiving from him.

I was in second grade.

I had written some small thing, and I said to a friend that he was going to “end up in trouble in the newspaper.” I meant it the way an eight-year-old means anything. I was showing off.

My father treated it as a broken rule. Not a joke, not a cute thing a kid said. A rule.

You never flaunt the power of journalism to put someone down.

I thought of that as a small domestic moment for most of my life. Then, reading about him after he was gone, I found out he had made the same call on the biggest day of his career, and that it is in a book.

• • •

Dateline: September 1982. USA TODAY is about to publish its first issue.

A plane had crashed in Spain that Monday. The paper had bought striking photographs taken by a passenger from Minnesota, and they were going on the front page, in the center column. The editors were struggling with the headline, partly because the story would be two days old by the time anyone held the paper.

What they had written was: “55 Die in Fiery Crash.”

My father read it and told them that was not the story. The story was how many lived.

The headline that ran in the first edition of USA TODAY on September 15, 1982 was: “Miracle: 327 Survive, 55 Die.”

Same instinct. Which way are you pointing the instrument?

You can aim it at the dead or you can aim it at the survivors, and both versions are accurate, and only one of them is the story. You can tell a second grader that a newspaper is a thing you can hurt people with, or you can stop him.

• • •

Red Smith won the Pulitzer Prize and spent the rest of his life refusing the title that came with it. He called himself a newspaperman, not a sportswriter and not a columnist. What he said, in more than one interview, was that he would like to be remembered as a good reporter.

Until the Times, which he did not reach until he was past normal retirement age, he had never worked anywhere but the second paper in town, and those papers kept folding underneath him. His line about it was that he killed them all. He said it smiling. His dedication to doing the hard work required of journalistic excellence is forever captured by what is surely his most famous quote. “Writing is easy,” he said.”Just sit down, open a vein and bleed.”

Neither of these men could hand a career to a son. Red Smith could not give Terry a column, and Terry went off and did work that looked nothing like his father’s. My father could not give me a newsroom, and I ended up in television, which was not his world at all.

What they handed down was narrower than a job and much harder to lose. A standard. Be a good reporter. Do not fake it. Do not use it on people. And when you have a choice about where to point it, point it at the ones who lived.

• • •

Now back to Terry’s cousin.

Five men in one family with New York City newspaper bylines, and the best writer among them was a woman whose name did not come up until the end of a sentence sixty years later — Terry’s cousin Georgia, the daughter of his uncle Art.

I did not plan for the essay to land here. It landed here on its own.

Because the thing people said about my father when he died, more than anything else, was that he hired the people other editors would not. Julia Wallace, a reporter who worked for him at USA TODAY and later ran the Journal-Constitution said it plainly. While others would not take a chance on women or people of color, he saw it as an opportunity. Her judgment was that there are so many women and people of color in news today because of him.

She is now the chair of the Cronkite School at Arizona State.

So, one family had five bylines and an uncounted cousin, and one editor in Virginia spent the eighties handing out the bylines nobody else would. I never asked him about that either. It never occurred to me to ask.

• • •

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Terry whether he had any hope for young people going into this now.

He pointed out something I had not known. Enrollment in journalism programs is up. He asked us to sit with that for a moment, because those students can see exactly what they are walking into. The business is in chaos, the method of delivery is changing under them and will keep changing, and they are coming anyway.

• • •

I want to tell you what I found this week.

C-SPAN has seven videos of my father. Seven. They run from 1983 to 1988, which is nearly the whole of his time at USA TODAY.

The first one is from September of 1983, the paper’s first anniversary. C-SPAN put cameras inside the building in Rosslyn, Virginia and stayed on the air from one in the afternoon until around midnight, showing the whole day. My father opened the broadcast, took calls from Fargo and Sweetwater and New Orleans, and then went downstairs to the fourteenth floor for the planning meeting while the cameras followed.

I was in my early twenties. I had no idea.

The last caller before he left the desk came from Sweetwater, Texas, and asked the hard question, the one the whole industry was asking about USA TODAY at the time. Short stories, forty pages, color on every front. Was it not just going to take readers away from “real newspapers,” the way television had?

My father called it an excellent question, and then disagreed with it.

“People have a real appetite for information,” he said. “The more of it they get, the more of it they want, rather than the less.”

He said the paper had drawn in people who would not otherwise have taken the time to read, and that the heaviest readers had simply added it to the pile, and that the whole thing builds on itself. You watch something on television, and it makes you want to read about it. You read about it and it makes you want to watch. Then the line that stopped me. “We are feeding that appetite, rather than taking away from it.”

The C-Span host thanked him, glanced at the phone lines, and said it must feel good to know that people really care out there.

• • •

Read those two things next to each other.

In 2026, a great journalist I worked with at CBS News told me not to despair. People care about the world around them and need to know about it, he said, and as long as that is true, there is a role for true journalism.

In 1983, my father sat in a makeshift TV studio on the sixteenth floor of the USA TODAY building in Virginia, and told a caller in Texas that the appetite grows by being fed.

Same argument. Forty-three years apart. One of them made by a man I never got around to asking.

I am not going to pretend this cancels the regret. It does not. I had decades and a press pass and I did not use either one, and there is no version of that I get to feel good about.

But I was wrong about one thing. I thought the interview did not exist.

It exists. Somebody else conducted it, on a Sunday afternoon in September 1982, while he was in the middle of the work and had no idea his son would come looking for it forty-three years later. There are six more interviews like that. (The hundreds of video stories I have created for broadcasts like CBS Sunday Morning and ABC Good Morning America often strike me as ephemeral, serving their purpose and then — for the most part — vanishing back into the invisibility from whence they came into our lives. For that reason, the existence of those C-Span video recordings of my father, made more than forty years ago, seem nothing short of miraculous.)

So, I have the standard, which turned out to be the transferable part. And now I have his voice explaining why any of it is worth doing, which is the part I assumed was gone.

Somewhere right now a young person is filling out an application to journalism school, walking into a business that is in a state of monumental transformation, because somebody they grew up around taught them that the world is a story.

“The appetite grows by being fed.” My father said so on television, in 1983, and he turned out to be right.

Terence Smith appeared as our guest on Episode 15 of “True Journalism,” the podcast series I co-host with my colleague Richard Schreiber, also a dedicated journalist.

Watch the video episode here on Substack.

And listen to the audio version of the episode here on Spotify.

Terence Smith’s memoir, “Four Wars, Five Presidents: A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House,” is available on Amazon.

There is a photograph of me throwing a punch at Muhammad Ali.

He is throwing one back. Neither punch is real. We are both grinning, and his fist is stopped a few inches from my chest, and anyone looking at that picture understands immediately that nothing is happening in it.

That is the honest kind of staged photograph. Everybody in the frame knows what the frame is for.

I want to tell you about a different one.

• • •

The man who introduced me to Ali was a magician.

Alvin Goodman was a Miami attorney who once argued a case before the United States Supreme Court, and who that same week might perform a magic show for a room full of children. He was also deeply woven into the Miami boxing world, back when a young fighter named Cassius Clay was training at the legendary Fifth Street Gym, and he eventually chaired the state athletic commission.

I met him in 1970, in third grade, when my family moved to Miami and I signed up for a Saturday morning magic class at the Museum of Science. I took that class for years. Eventually I became his assistant and taught it myself. He gave me “The Linking Rings,” which I still perform, fifty-some years later.

So when Alvin introduced me to Muhammad Ali, it was not because I was anybody. It was because Ali loved magic.

Paul McCartney, who met him in Miami in 1964 and crossed paths with him for decades afterward, wrote when Ali died that he was a beautiful, gentle man with a great sense of humor who would often pull a pack of cards out of his pocket, no matter how posh the occasion, and do a card trick for you.

Hold on to that. It matters later.

• • •

Bryan Mattimore has spent thirty years teaching corporations how to generate ideas on purpose rather than by accident. He co-founded Growth Engine Company, wrote 21 Days to a Big Idea and Idea Stormers, and has run more than a thousand ideation sessions. Richard Schreiber and I had him on our podcast, “True Journalism.”

His newest book breaks down fifty branding and influence strategies. One chapter is called create spectacle on a shoestring.

His examples are the ones you would expect and one you would not. Gandhi’s salt march, which cost almost nothing and was covered every day. The Boston Tea Party. And then, his favorite, Muhammad Ali and a swimming pool.

I knew the photographs. I did not know the story.

• • •

In 1961 a freelance photographer named Flip Schulke was assigned to shoot a nineteen-year-old boxer in Miami. Schulke was not a lightweight. He would go on to photograph Martin Luther King Jr., the March on Washington, the space program and Dallas.

To impress the kid, Schulke showed him a spread he had recently published in Life, water-skiers photographed from below the surface.

Clay listened. Then he mentioned, as if it were nothing, that he happened to train underwater. An old trainer up in Louisville had told him the water resistance works like a weight.

He got into the pool at the Sir John Hotel in Overtown, one of the few desegregated pools in the country at the time, and started throwing punches. Schulke watched the bubbles come off his fists.

It sounded plausible. Schulke pitched it to Sports Illustrated, and the editor there thought he was crazy for wanting to photograph a boxer in a swimming pool. So he took it to Life, and Life ran it in September of 1961 under the headline “A Wet Way to Train for a Fight.” The text quoted Clay saying his speed came from punching underwater.

He had never trained that way. He could not swim.

• • •

Now the detail I cannot stop thinking about.

The single most famous frame from that shoot, the one you have seen, Clay fully submerged with his fists raised and his eyes open, did not run in Life.

The editors rejected it. They thought it looked too posed.

Read that again. Their instinct fired. A room full of professional skeptics looked at those pictures and something felt arranged to them, and they were right, and they aimed it at the composition. They caught the pose and missed the premise.

The photograph was real. The photographer was honest. The magazine was careful. And the story was invented by a teenager.

Three years later Schulke went back to photograph him again, by then heavyweight champion of the world and no longer named Cassius Clay. They were paging through a scrapbook. He came to the underwater pictures and winked.

Schulke wrote later that he realized in that moment he had been taken, that Ali and his trainer had come up with the whole thing on their own, and that it made fantastic pictures.

• • •

It was not the only time.

In February of 1964, at the Fifth Street Gym on Miami Beach, the photographer Harry Benson brought the Beatles to meet him. The picture everyone knows, Ali standing over four flattened Englishmen, was Benson’s idea. Benson has said that Ali did everything he asked, that he got the Beatles to make faces as though he were knocking them all out, that he did everything for a great shot.

The Beatles were reluctant. Ali was not. He had done this before.

• • •

Here is why I keep returning to the magic.

A journalist who spent time with Ali much later wrote that he loved magic even though his faith frowned on it, and that he did it anyway, mostly to amuse strangers, and then righted the wrong by revealing the secrets of his tricks.

That was the rule. Perform it, then show them how it was done.

Which means the wink at the scrapbook was not a boast. It was the reveal. Late by three years, but he came back and did it, the way he came back and did it with the cards.

I have performed the linking rings for decades. I know exactly how the audience is directed to watch the wrong hand. And I am telling you that if I had been standing on the deck of that pool in 1961, watching the bubbles come off his fists, I would have believed him.

Knowing how the method works does not make you immune to it. It only tells you the method exists.

• • •

Twenty years of my career were spent deciding what deserved a camera. The twenty since have been spent helping authors and experts earn attention from people making that same decision. I have stood on both sides of that pool.

So I am not writing this from above it. I posed for my own picture. I threw the fake punch.

But there is a question I wish I had learned to ask earlier, and it is not whether the thing in front of the lens is real. That is usually the easy part. The pool was real. The punches were real. The bubbles were real.

The question is who arranged for you to see it.

Ali always came back and showed you how it was done.

Almost nobody else does.

Bryan Mattimore joined us for Episode 16 of “True Journalism,” the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode here on Substack.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here on Spotify.

# # # #

Two statements were released about the same agreement on the same day.

The first came from a White House briefing. It said Iran had agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program.

The second is the ninth point of the document itself. It says Iran shall maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program.

The status quo is a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Maintaining it is not giving it up. It is the opposite of giving it up.

Both statements were public. Only one of them required you to open anything.

• • •

I want to be careful here, because this is not an essay about one agreement or one administration.

It is an essay about a habit I did not invent and cannot claim credit for. I learned it from a book.

Strobe Talbott spent twenty-one years as a journalist at Time. He covered the State Department when Henry Kissinger ran it, covered the White House under Gerald Ford, and served as the magazine’s diplomatic correspondent and later its Washington bureau chief. In 1979 he published Endgame, the inside account of the SALT II negotiations. He went on to become Deputy Secretary of State, and after that president of the Brookings Institution.

So he read these documents as a reporter, then helped write them as a diplomat, and then wrote down what he had learned.

The pattern he kept finding was this. American concessions get drafted so they are binding. The other side’s core obligations get drafted so they are aspirational.

Not hidden. Not secret. Drafted.

That is a claim about grammar, not about villains. It survives changes of party and changes of decade, which is exactly what makes it useful. Talbott was describing a Democratic administration’s treaty when he wrote it.

• • •

On our podcast, True Journalism, my co-host Richard Schreiber and I gave this a name. We call it “The Binding Test,” and we named it for Talbott.

It is one question, asked of every consequential provision in any official document. Is this obligation enforceable now, or is it contingent on some future agreement that may never arrive?

Then hold the two columns side by side. If our obligations are due immediately and theirs are deferred, the headline ought to say so.

Run it on the memorandum I opened with. The $300 billion commitment is required now. The sanctions relief is required now. The nuclear verification mechanism is deferred, contingent on a further agreement to be reached within sixty days, with nothing in the text to enforce it if that agreement never comes.

One side is affirming. The other side is required.

The distance between those two verbs is the story. It is almost always the story.

• • •

I have a reason to trust this particular lesson, and it is not a book.

I got my start in the early 1980s at the CBS News Washington bureau, and the story that ran through that town was Iran-Contra.

Congress had passed the Boland Amendment to do one specific thing. Bar federal money from reaching the Contras in Nicaragua. That was the guardrail. It was law. It was not ambiguous.

People inside the National Security Council found a way around it and funded that war anyway.

Oliver North admitted the operation on the stand in the summer of 1987, testifying under a grant of limited immunity. He was convicted on three felony counts in May of 1989. In July of 1990 the D.C. Circuit vacated those convictions, on the ground that witnesses at his trial might have been affected by the testimony he had given Congress under that immunity. By 1991 the charges were dismissed.

I watched colleagues in that bureau cover every stage of it.

What I took from those years is not cynicism. It is something narrower and more useful. A rule restrains power only when someone is willing to enforce it. The text is necessary. The text is not sufficient.

Which means reading the document is where the work starts, not where it ends.

• • •

Now the part I am least comfortable writing, and the reason I am writing it anyway.

That same week in June, the Supreme Court decided Mullin v. Doe. Six to three. The Court cleared the way to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, with Justice Alito writing that the statute bars judicial review of those determinations.

That distinction matters, and it is the one most likely to get lost. The Court did not rule that the policy was lawful. It ruled that it would not look.

When Richard and I prepared that segment, we had two problems in our own copy.

The first was a number. The figure circulating was around 1.3 million people across seventeen countries. That is the population the precedent could eventually reach. It is not who this ruling decided. This ruling covers roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians. Hundreds of thousands of people living here lawfully under a program Congress created in 1990, signed by a Republican president. The smaller number is the accurate one, and the smaller number is still enormous.

The second problem was a quotation. We had a line attributed to Justice Kagan’s dissent that had softened in transit, the way paraphrases do once somebody puts quotation marks around them. What she actually wrote is sharper than the version we had. She wrote that the people in this case were asking for one thing only, to remain in the country while they continued to litigate their claims, and that they were entitled to that relief rather than being consigned to devastating and indeed life-threatening injury.

We caught both before we recorded. I am not telling you this to be admired for it. I am telling you because an essay instructing you to read the primary source is worth very little from someone unwilling to say that his own first draft failed the test.

• • •

“The Binding Test” is not sophisticated. That is its whole appeal. It requires no credential, no source in the building, no access of any kind. It requires that you find the document and read the ninth point.

Almost nobody does. I understand why. The briefing is right there, it is written in plain language, and it takes eleven seconds.

But a press release is an argument about a document. It is not the document.

If you are reading only the argument, you are not watching the news.

You are watching its absence.

“The Binding Test” is the Journalist’s Tool featured in Episode 17 of True Journalism, the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode on Substack.

Listen on Spotify.

# # # #

I was caught in two layoffs at CBS News.

What I remember is not the conversation. It is the arithmetic.

The instruction came down as a number. Reduce by three hundred. Put three hundred names on a list.

I remember thinking that this was not fair, and then thinking, almost in the same breath, that this was simply how it worked. Both things were true. Only one of them was useful.

I had chosen this. In the early days I was on track to be a lawyer, and I decided instead to be a journalist, and within the first couple of years I understood exactly what I had signed. I had picked a line of work with no particular stability in it. Some people stay at one network for forty years. Most of us do not.

Knowing that in advance helps less than you would expect.

• • •

Rich Diefenbach and I were at CBS News in the same years, from 1989 into the mid-1990s, which means we remember the same long nights. He ran news operations at ABC before that. He built the assignment desk at Fox. He came back to ABC for World News with Peter Jennings and Nightline with Ted Koppel. Richard Schreiber and I recently had him on our podcast, “True Journalism,” and I have been carrying one thing he said ever since.

He has been through it too, more than once, and he does not dress it up. He calls it “a punishing business,” and he is quoting someone who told him so years ago.

He described the conversation. “Your contract has become expensive and can no longer be justified.” Or “There is a whole layer of management below you, people you trained yourself, who could move up into your position.” “Nothing personal.” “Here is your package.”

He said you take it very personally, because of course you do.

Then he said this.

“You are not your job and your title. You are who you are and the work that you have done.”

• • •

He arrived there by way of Scott Pelley.

Pelley was fired from “60 Minutes” in June, after a confrontation with the program’s new leadership in a staff meeting. He had been at CBS News for thirty-seven years. The meeting in which he lost the job lasted about ten minutes, and he says he did not see it coming.

Rich watched Pelley’s long interview with The New York Times about all of it, straight through, and he made a point of telling us so. He did not want to be heard offering a brushstroke opinion about a man he had not actually listened to.

Which brings me to the part that got lost in the noise.

Pelley was not mourning his job. He said so plainly. He said he did not feel sorry for himself, that he did not care about himself, that he was not emotional over having lost the position. What broke him was the people he was leaving behind and the way they had been treated. He described “60 Minutes” as a family, colleagues he had worked beside for ten and twenty and thirty years, people he had traveled with and eaten with and gone into combat with.

Asked at the top of the interview how he was feeling, he reached for the worst thing he could think of. He said it was “like your spouse was murdered.”

The comparison drew a great deal of criticism. I understand the objection. I also understand why he reached for it.

Rich would not judge him. Everyone has a breaking point, he said. He was not in the man’s shoes.

That is not the ordinary reaction. The ordinary reaction to a colleague going out loudly is to decide whether he was right. Rich declined the question altogether. What he noticed instead was that a man who had given a place his entire self was undone not by losing his own title but by watching what happened to everyone else. That is a predictable injury in a business that does not warn anyone it is coming.

• • •

Rich left the desk for a classroom.

He taught history and English in New York and Connecticut schools. He teaches broadcast news writing at Pace University. He came to it partly through his own son, who was flagged as possibly having attention problems and who turned out to need prism glasses. A structural thing, not a deficit. Rich wanted to understand how children actually learn.

So he teaches with his hands. Kinetic sand for the domes of the world, so a student feels the shape before anyone asks him to remember the name attached to it. Different chairs for children who cannot sit still, because pretending otherwise helps nobody.

At the top of every syllabus he puts a quotation from James Baldwin: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”

On the morning of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, he was standing in front of an eighth-grade class while it was still unfolding. He pulled them into a circle and let them talk. He told them they were safe here.

Eleven years before that, on September 11, he had been in a control room deciding what a shaken country was not yet ready to see.

Different rooms. Same job. Decide what people can absorb, and in what order, and care enough about them to get it right.

• • •

In August, Columbia Journalism School announced that Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi had been appointed journalists in residence for the coming academic year. They will work with students through lectures and workshops on reporting, investigation and sourcing, and each will write a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review.

There has also been reporting, denied by people close to the man it concerns, that some of the ousted staff are trying to build something new. Perhaps. That is not the part that interests me.

The part that interests me is the classroom.

Pelley spent thirty-seven years at CBS News, twenty-seven of them at “60 Minutes.” In June the institution let him go. By August he was going to teach. His own statement was that this is a critical time for a free press, and that he was honored to join that cause.

Nobody gave him his title back. He did not need it in order to do the work.

• • •

Rich said none of this about Pelley. He said it about layoffs in general, in the middle of an hour about something else entirely, and then he moved on to the next thing.

But there they are. Two men, a generation apart, both shown the door by networks under new ownership, both of them now standing in front of students.

For a long time I have thought about my two layoffs as things that “happened to me.” Rich’s sentence rearranges that. The list was real. The number was real. Neither one was a verdict on the work, because the work had already happened and could not be recalled.

The instruction came down as a number, and I still remember it as a number.

But nobody on that list stopped being a journalist on the day their name went on it.

Rich Diefenbach appeared on Episode 18 of True Journalism, the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode on Substack.

Listen to the audio version of this episode on Spotify.

# # # #

A few weeks ago I read that Paul McCartney had performed at Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden.

My first thought was that somebody had made it up.

I want to be precise about why, because at the time the reasoning felt sound. Take one enormous name. Add a second enormous name. Attach both to the event everyone is already talking about. Set it somewhere no cameras were allowed. Then release it into a system that rewards whatever moves fastest.

That is not a news story. That is a recipe.

I said so out loud on our podcast. Then I checked.

It happened. July 3, at the Garden. McCartney played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” a song he had not performed live since the Beatles played the Paramount Theatre in New York in September of 1964. Sixty-two years. Stevie Nicks sang. Adam Sandler officiated.

I have some standing here, which makes it worse. I worked with Paul McCartney on a project for ABC News. And still my instinct, built over forty years in newsrooms, told me the story was a fabrication.

I was wrong in the most ordinary way available.

• • •

Barclay Palmer spent twenty-one years at CNN and CBS. He was a founding senior producer on Anderson Cooper 360, he produced for Christiane Amanpour, and he designed Reuters TV for Thomson Reuters. He has a Peabody, a duPont-Columbia, an Emmy and a Murrow. Richard Schreiber and I welcomed him as our interview guest on our latest episode of “True Journalism,” the podcast series we launched in February, and I have been turning over one thing he said ever since.

I expected him to talk about liars. Everyone talks about liars.

He talked about volume instead.

There is an overabundance on every platform, he said, of all kinds of people and topics, and it has become harder for people to sift through it. So a lot of people just do not. They pick sides, and then they stop sifting. He called the result a dumbing down of the media and of the public, and he was careful to exempt journalism itself. Not good journalism. The work is still being done. What has collapsed is the reader’s ability to find it in the pile.

Independent sifting of the evidence is the thing journalism was built to do. He does not believe the platforms most of us now use support it.

If the problem is liars, better detection saves you. Learn the tells. Check the hands in the photograph. Slow down.

If the problem is volume, detection does not save you at all. True things and invented things arrive in the same feed, at the same speed, in the same typeface. You cannot examine all of it. So you stop examining any of it, and you begin deciding what to believe based on who is saying it.

That is not laziness. That is arithmetic.

• • •

The numbers are worse than the argument.

The Reuters Institute published its Digital News Report in June, drawn from nearly a hundred thousand people across forty-eight markets. For the first time in fifteen years of counting, social media and video networks are the most widely used route to news on earth. Fifty-four percent. Ahead of television. Ahead of news organizations’ own websites and apps.

The same report found concern about manipulated content running above seventy-five percent in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and the worry rises with reliance on those platforms. The audience is not naive. The audience knows.

Knowing does not appear to help. When researchers test whether people can separate synthetic material from real material, the results are consistent. A study published by the Association for Computing Machinery carried the title “As Good as a Coin Toss.” Across images, audio and video, human accuracy sat close to fifty percent. A separate analysis pooling fifty-six studies and more than eighty-six thousand participants reached the same conclusion.

Fifty percent is not a skill. Fifty percent is a coin.

• • •

Now the part that took me longest to see.

The detail about what McCartney played traces back to one unnamed source who spoke to People. Rolling Stone carried it. So did the Irish Times, E! News, the Hollywood Reporter and a great many others. McCartney’s representatives declined to confirm it to at least two of them.

One anonymous source, repeated several hundred times, looks exactly like consensus. It is not consensus. It is one source with an echo.

What actually settled anything were two people who had been in the room. Robin Roberts said on Good Morning America the next morning that yes, Stevie Nicks performed. George Stephanopoulos, also a guest at the wedding, said the same. Named eyewitnesses, on the record, at eight in the morning on a broadcast network.

I worked at Good Morning America from 2001 to 2005. I did not expect the old machinery to be the thing that closed the loop.

So my skepticism was not wrong as a method. It was wrong about the answer. And the enormous volume of coverage that made the story feel confirmed was performing no verification whatsoever. It was making one thin thread look like rope.

• • •

I asked Barclay what an ordinary person is supposed to do about all this.

He did not offer a system. A little skepticism about all sides, he said, including the side we might agree with. Look for facts rather than opinion. He thinks people have lost track of the difference. People argue there is no such thing as objective. Maybe, he said. But there are such things as facts.

I have been in newsrooms since Walter Cronkite was vacating the chair for Dan Rather. What I did not anticipate is that my own instrument would begin misfiring in both directions at once. Not merely believing things that were false. Disbelieving things that were true.

If a man who has done this for forty years cannot call it on a story where nothing whatsoever is at stake, I am not sure what we are asking of a person reading a phone at seven in the morning, on a story that is.

Paul McCartney sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time in sixty-two years, in a room full of witnesses, and I decided it was invented.

The song was real. The room was real.

Only my confidence was manufactured.

Listen to the full conversation. Barclay Palmer appeared on Episode 19 of “True Journalism,” the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode here on Substack

Listen on Spotify

The Last Stop Before Air

By Tom Martin | True Journalism, Episode 18 | Guest: Rich Diefenbach

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in Colorado Springs, preparing to shoot a story about the schools for Good Morning America with Greg Hunter, the program’s investigative correspondent.

Greg has a commando’s temperament. While most of us were still absorbing what we were watching, he had worked forward to the practical consequence. The airlines were going to stop flying within hours. If we wanted to get back to New York, we were driving, and we were leaving now. He knows cars, so we took the rental sedan to the Hertz counter at the airport and traded it for something more substantial. Those employees were standing behind a counter in Colorado watching New York burn, and two men walked up and asked to exchange a car. They were kind about it. Nobody in that building yet knew how to behave.

Every gas station we stopped at, in every state, had a small television next to the register. We would watch for a minute, because everyone did. Then someone would ask where we were headed.

That is our destination.

In 2001, that answer produced a particular silence. Not suspicion. Something closer to worry on our behalf. The sentence would not land the same way today, and the change is worth sitting with.

I got to Ground Zero while the ruins were still smoldering. A priest at St. Paul’s Chapel took my crew and me as close as anyone was permitted to go, riding in the bed of his pickup truck. Inside, the whole sanctuary was lit by candles, and firefighters and construction workers came in off their shifts for a shoulder massage, a foot rub, and something to eat before going back into the ruins.

Then I did the actual job, which was sitting in living rooms with families who had lost people. Some had been on the phone in the final minutes and knew, while they were speaking, that the person on the other end was not coming out. One father lost two sons that morning. One was a police officer. One was a firefighter.

Nobody drives seventeen hundred miles imagining that.

Eight blocks away

Twenty-five years later, Richard Schreiber and I had Rich Diefenbach on our podcast, True Journalism. Rich and I were at CBS News in the same years, from 1989 into the mid-1990s, so we know the same long nights. He ran news operations at ABC before that. He spent years at Fox News, where he built the assignment desk, then returned to ABC for World News with Peter Jennings and Nightline with Ted Koppel.

On September 11 he was in New York, a short walk from what I was driving toward.

He had recently come off the assignment desk. Fifteen years of running a desk for a twenty-four-hour news channel had worn him down, and tape and graphics looked like a change. So on the worst news day of his life, his job was not sending people into the field. His job was deciding what the country would see.

He had roughly a hundred people moving around him. He told them their job was to be storytellers, and that anything troubling had to come to him first. He was the last stop before air.

Then the call came down from the executive floor. Stop running the plane going into the building.

He pulled it out of the deck. He was careful with the footage of people falling. He still thinks about images that never went out, and about images that went out later, once there was a responsible way to use them.

He wanted to be at the site. Everyone did. He could not go. His wife could not get into the city and his clothes were at home, so for days he wore first responder shirts to the editorial meeting, because that was what he had.

Then he said the sentence I have not been able to put down.

“My first responder responsibility was to be a journalist.”

The coroner, not the wire

The same discipline shows up everywhere in his career, in smaller stories that are easier to overlook.

He would not take casualty figures off the wire. On one story the Associated Press was reporting as many as sixteen dead. Rich went with six. His anchors were uncomfortable, because the wire number was bigger and it was already out there. Rich told them six was what he had, because he had it from the coroner. That is the source. Do your own original reporting and report it responsibly.

He extended the same trust downward. When a reporter in the field brought him something, he did not rewrite it. He asked whether they were sure, and whether they had checked this and checked that. If the answers held up, his instruction was to go with what they had.

Both halves matter. Verify hard, then trust the person who did the verifying.

Two directions, one job

I spent three days driving toward the fire. Rich spent his a few blocks from it, unable to go, deciding what a shaken country should not have to look at yet.

Neither of us got the version of service we wanted. Both of us did the work anyway, and the work was quieter than either of us had pictured.

There is a version of this business that mistakes proximity for value and volume for courage. Get closer. Show more. Say it louder. Rich’s day argues the opposite. The most consequential thing he did on September 11 was decide what not to broadcast, on behalf of people who were not ready, and the second most consequential was reporting a smaller number than everyone else because it was the true one.

Charles Kuralt, my mentor at CBS News, believed the best of America was not in the halls of power but in ordinary people. What I did not understand until Rich said his sentence out loud is that it applies to the people doing the covering too. The work that matters is almost never the part that looks like the work.

Listen to the full conversation. Rich Diefenbach appeared on Episode 18 of True Journalism, the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode on Substack.

Listen to the audio version of the episode on Spotify.

My mother was born and raised in New Orleans. So when the water came in 2005, I was not watching Hurricane Katrina the way most of the country was watching it. I was watching a place my family came from.

And I was watching Anderson Cooper, who at some point during that coverage stopped sounding like a correspondent and started sounding like a man who had seen enough.

I remember thinking he had stepped over a line. A journalist reports. He was doing something else. He was insisting.

I also remember thinking I was glad he did it.

That memory sat with me for twenty years without resolving into anything useful, until I had the chance to ask someone who was actually in the room. Barclay Palmer was a founding senior producer on Anderson Cooper 360. He also produced for Christiane Amanpour. Before that he was a producer in the field covering disasters, and after CNN he moved to CBS News, where he helped build CBSN (now called “CBS News 24/7”), and went on to design Reuters TV for Thomson Reuters. He has a Peabody, a duPont-Columbia, an Emmy, and a Murrow award. He is now executive editor and head of business strategy at Climate and Capital Media.

My co-host Richard Schreiber and I had him on our podcast, True Journalism. I asked him what it was like to work with those two.

His answer about Cooper was more interesting than the compliment I expected. He said Anderson has a clear moral compass and a sense of what is right, and that this is partly what made him famous. Then he added the other half. Anderson also has a sense of what is commercially viable. He pays attention to what people want to see and to whether a story will hold an audience. Barclay called that a commercial instinct, and he said it served Anderson well and served CNN well, to his credit.

Then he described Christiane Amanpour, and the portrait changed.

He called her a true blue journalist to the core, and said she pays somewhat less attention to that commercial question. To her credit, he said. She takes up topics that are not popular. She asks questions that upset people. She has stood by her tough questions and analyses, and won acclaim for them, even when others have claimed she crossed a line.

And then he said the thing I have not been able to put down since.

You cannot get the passion to take up those topics, and ask those hard questions despite criticism and even retaliation, and dig beneath what everyone is already saying, without also being accused at times of “crossing a line.” It comes as a package. Some of the best journalists get in trouble precisely because they are doing the job well.

Unless you get to that line, he said, you are not really doing anything.

He had a phrase for the alternative. He asked how many hours and networks and anchors we watch doing what he called “milquetoast journalism.” Talking about what is perceived to be the news without ever revealing anything below the surface.

I have worked in newsrooms since the days when Walter Cronkite was vacating the chair for Dan Rather. I have watched a lot of “milquetoast journalism” myself. I have probably (inadvertently) produced some.

What I did not fully understand until this conversation is how much harder the structure has made it to approach the line at all.

Barclay explained it with numbers, which is the only way this argument ever lands. On Anderson’s show they had minute-to-minute ratings. You could watch the audience leave in real time. Any international story, down. Any war story, down. He has talked with former colleagues now running an two top broadcast news shows who tell him that every time they run something on climate, the ratings fall.

If you are running a business, that is meaningful. That was his phrase, and he was not being cynical. He was being accurate. The person who decides whether to run the difficult story is looking at a graph that punishes them for running it.

So the line moves. Not because anyone in particular lost their nerve, but because the instrument measuring success got faster and more granular, and the difficult story never wins a fast, granular measurement.

Here is what makes Barclay worth listening to on this. He helped build the thing that measures.

He was on the front edge of the digital transition, and he told two stories about it that I keep turning over.

The first: at Thomson Reuters, he took roughly two million dollars from Google and YouTube and became one of their first major and successful journalism partners.

Reuters TV went from zero to 1.7 million unique monthly viewers in ten months, which is an extraordinary number. And he remembers a senior executive asking what on earth they were doing with a “cat video” channel, and why anyone would partner with YouTube, since obviously there was no future in it.

The second is better, because it cuts against him. After all the digital work at CNN, the partnerships, the social platforms, the op-ed site built to pull audiences back to the broadcast, a senior figure at the network told him the effort had failed. It had not meaningfully raised the ratings.

Barclay’s response was not a defense. It was a question about measurement. Perhaps the effort did not raise ratings. On the other hand, without it, the ratings might have fallen. Which is what happened later anyway. Meanwhile, the digital partnerships added millions of new viewers across multiple social platforms. And it’s arguable that growth across global digital platforms was as important as how much cable TV ratings were boosted.

You cannot prove a counterfactual. That is exactly the problem. The value of the thing that prevents a decline is invisible to any instrument built to detect growth.

He made a related observation about climate finance that I thought was the sharpest thing he said all hour. Banks, he said, including central banks, have used financial models that consistently underestimate climate impact. One reason is that the models do not account for cascading effects. This happens, which causes that, which causes the next thing.

He called it ironic. Bankers forgetting the principle of compound interest.

I would put it differently. It is not that they forgot. It is that the model rewarded them for a shorter horizon, and they optimized for the model. Which is the same story as the minute-to-minute ratings, wearing a different suit.

Not long ago I watched the live broadcast of the play “Good Night, and Good Luck” from Broadway, as it was broadcast live on CNN. What struck me was not the McCarthy material, which I knew. It was the conflict between Edward R. Murrow and William Paley over commercial interest. Paley was not a villain. He was a man running a business, looking at a number.

Murrow got to the line. It cost him the program.

So when the Reuters Institute reports that global trust in news has fallen to thirty-seven percent, the lowest since they began measuring in 2015, and that only twenty-two percent of people trust the news they encounter on social media, I do not read that as an audience that turned on journalism for no reason. I read it as an audience that can tell the difference between reporting that approaches the line and reporting that stays comfortably behind it, and has largely stopped paying for the second kind.

I asked Barclay what an ordinary person should do about any of this. He said something practical and something unexpected.

The practical part: skepticism about all sides, including the side you already agree with. Look for facts rather than opinion. He thinks people have lost track of the difference.

The unexpected part came from a man named John Raskin at the Spring Street Climate Fund, who told him that a single email or phone call to a policymaker carries far more weight than one voice, because the office assumes that anyone who bothers to call represents a few hundred people who care and did not.

I like that because it inverts the usual complaint. We spend a great deal of energy asking what the press owes the public. Less time on the other direction.

Barclay put it as a question about our era. Will people pick up the baton, or stand on the sidelines?

I do not know. But I noticed something about how he answered my question, and it took me a while to see it.

I asked him about two famous journalists. He answered by describing the moment each of them decided what to risk.

That is where the job actually happens. Not in the credentials, not in the awards, not in the platform. In the small private calculation, made under a deadline, about how close you are willing to get.

Some of us get to the line. Most of us do not.

The ones who do are the reason the rest of it is worth anything at all.

Listen to the full conversation. Barclay Palmer appeared on Episode 19 of True Journalism, the podcast I co-host with Richard Schreiber.

Watch the video episode here on Substack

Listen on Spotify

If this essay was useful to you, the episode goes considerably deeper, and Barclay is worth an hour of anyone’s time.

Fifteen wounded troops were quietly removed from the official Pentagon casualty list, without explanation. The Washington Post used commercial satellite imagery to document 228 damaged or destroyed structures at U.S. bases in the Iran war — far more than the War Department has acknowledged. Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States to 64th in the world for press freedom, between Botswana and Panama. And the Secretary of Health and Human Services told Congress under oath that there are no cuts to Medicaid, while the Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at $911 billion.

This is not a list of separate stories. It is a pattern. And the pattern is the story.

The Fairness Doctrine fell in 1987. The press ranking fell to 64th in 2026. If you are not demanding verifiable sources, you are not consuming the news. You are consuming its absence.

Listen to the full episode here. →

Michael Ashley is a Forbes columnist, former Disney screenwriter, co-author of Own the AI Revolution, and creator of The AI Philosopher — where he writes about AI not as a productivity story but as a power story. He calls himself a positive futurist, which is the right frame for a conversation about hard things.

Five days before this episode aired, the President of the United States handed his acting Attorney General a stack of news articles with the word “Treason” written in Sharpie on a sticky note. Grand jury subpoenas to the Wall Street Journal followed. Michael walked in to talk about AI ethics. He walked out as Exhibit A in the case he has been building.

We also dig into AI surveillance of journalists in conflict zones, the forty percent of Americans now getting news from AI platforms, and the DOJ policy reversal that made the WSJ subpoena possible.

Listen to the full episode here. →

This week on True Journalism, Richard Schreiber and I sit down with Kim Karr, Co-Founder of Digital4Good and #ICANHELP. Kim has trained more than 2.4 million students, parents, and educators across 1,500 schools. She has partnered with Google, Snapchat, Facebook, and Supercell. And she has a name for the students she trains that gets at the heart of her work: Digital First Responders.

We also dig into the Meta and YouTube verdicts, the Pam Bondi firing, the Iran strike, and a Supreme Court hearing with a rather unusual visitor in the gallery.

Listen to the full episode here. →

Late last night, a powerful story came to my attention that cut through what has been, to say the least, a chaotic news cycle.

Not because it was the loudest headline.
Not because it dominated cable news for weeks.
But because it arrived with speed, moral clarity, and unmistakable anguish.

In a matter of three days, Bruce Springsteen wrote, recorded, and released a new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” responding to the killing of innocent people during protests against the federal government’s brutal immigration crackdown. People shot and killed by ICE agents. Lives ended. Families shattered. And almost immediately, official statements that asked us not to believe what we could plainly see with our own eyes.

Springsteen didn’t wait for a commission report.
He didn’t hedge.
He didn’t sanitize his anger.

He did what America’s great protest musicians have always done.

He bore witness.

Protest songs don’t let us forget

There’s a reason why protest songs have always mattered more than the headlines that inspired them.

Breaking news fades.
Music doesn’t.

A song lodges itself somewhere deeper in our psyches. It lodges itself in the nervous system, in memory, in the imagination. Long after the lyric captions disappear, the melody stays. The lyrics resurface years later, uninvited, at exactly the moment we need them.

Woody Guthrie understood this.
Pete Seeger understood it.
Bob Dylan. Joan Baez. Neil Young.

And Bruce Springsteen has understood it his entire career.

When Neil Young wrote “Ohio” after students were killed on the Kent State campus in 1970, he released his song of protest almost immediately, just one month later. Why? Because delay dulls moral urgency. When Springsteen released the song “American Skin (41 Shots)” after the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, by four New York City policemen, he endured backlash, boycotts, and political condemnation. Springsteen boldly sang the song anyway. (I was there in the audience of two back-to-back concerts at Madison Square Garden, where he featured the song.)

Now, decades later, here we are again.

Different names.
Different city.
Same grief.
Same pattern of power denying accountability.

And once again, Springsteen responds not with commentary, but with a song.

Why this hit me so personally

I’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen for most of my life.

The first time I saw him in concert was in 1981, at the Capitol Centre in Maryland, during the “Darkness on the Edge of Town era.” I was there with my dad, who passed away in May 2022. That night (like so many others) music wasn’t entertainment. It was a conversation between generations.

Years earlier, as a teenager growing up in Miami, I remember listening to Springsteen’s classidc anthem “Born to Run” on the car radio while my dad drove me downtown once a week so I could participate in a courtroom-observation program. Justice, storytelling, and music braided together in those drives.

My dad loved Bob Dylan. On Sunday mornings in the 1960s, vinyl albums by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez played on our home stereo. My dad (and mom) cared deeply about civil rights. About fairness. About paying attention when power tried to look away. It was a passionate belief that he took into his work every day, as a newspaper editor. (Don’t tell me “it’s all the media’s fault.”)

He would have understood immediately why Springsteen wrote this song.

He would have said, “This is what artists are for.”

In one of those quiet full-circle moments life sometimes gives us, I recently moved back to South Florida, the part of the country that I’ve always thought of as “home.” I now live in Wellington, Florida. (It’s just a few miles west of West Palm Beach, home of … you know …) It’s a town where Jessica Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa’s daughter, regularly competes in elite equestrian events.

It’s a small detail, but it felt oddly fitting. The music, the memories, parents and children, the sense of moral continuity, all of it looping back.

Music as moral memory

What struck me most about “Streets of Minneapolis” isn’t just the anger. It’s the insistence on memory.

Springsteen doesn’t let the victims become abstractions. He names them. He challenges official narratives. He places eyewitness truth against state power and dares listeners to decide which version of reality they’ll accept.

This is what protest music has always done at its best.

It refuses erasure.

And in a moment when so much information is distorted, buried, or deliberately forgotten, that refusal matters more than ever.

Fifty years ago, America wrestled with many of these same questions. Different language. Same fault lines. Different technology. Same moral stakes.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. And music often carries the rhyme scheme.

Why storytellers matter right now

This is where I step back and look at the larger pattern.

Bruce Springsteen didn’t just release a song.
He used storytelling to move people emotionally, morally, and imaginatively.

I’ve seen that power up close in my own work.

I once worked with an extraordinary artist named Devon Glover, who calls himself “The Sonnet Man.” He realized that children could memorize every word of their favorite rap songs, so (as a musically gifted young man with a teacher’s background) he set Shakespeare’s sonnets to hip-hop beats. Suddenly, language that once felt distant became unforgettable.

That’s how storytelling works when it’s done well.
It bypasses resistance.
It sticks.

For the past hundred days, I’ve been posting a short daily video on two different social media platforms, each video exploring how stories can open eyes, move hearts, and leave a lasting imprint. Not for attention, but because moments like this remind me that how we tell stories may shape what the world remembers.

A quiet call to action

Bruce Springsteen did his part.
He showed up.
He spoke plainly.
He refused to look away.

The question is what the rest of us do next.

If you’re a writer, an author, a speaker, a coach, or an expert in a field that ignites your passion, if you are someone carrying a message you care deeply about, this is not the moment to shrink your voice. It’s the moment to sharpen it. To tell the story only you can tell. To make sure it reaches beyond your immediate circle.

Because stories don’t just reflect the world; they help decide what kind of world we become.

And if you’d like help getting your ideas into the hands of more readers, your book into wider conversations, your message into the public square, that’s work I love doing, and work I believe matters.

Music reminds us.
Stories endure.
And sometimes, a song can still help a nation find its conscience.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some weeks leave the nation shaken. Not because of politics. Not because of elections. But because of grief.

This past week was one of those weeks.

As someone who spent decades producing stories and interviews for CBS News, CNN, and ABC’s Good Morning America, I’ve watched more than my share of difficult stories cross the wires. But the ones that hit the hardest are always the same: the attacks that strike ordinary Americans simply doing their jobs. Serving their communities. Wearing a uniform with pride.

That’s exactly what happened in Washington, D.C.

The First Tragedy: A 20-Year-Old National Guard Member Killed

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were ambushed while seated in their vehicle on the streets of Washington, D.C. They were part of a federal effort (initiated by President Trump) to increase National Guard presence to deter crime and restore order in key neighborhoods.

One of the soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, was killed. Just twenty. Barely past childhood. Younger than both of my children. Her whole life ahead of her.

Her fellow service member (24-year-old Andrew Wolfe) remains in critical condition.

Authorities arrested an Afghan immigrant who reportedly said he wanted revenge for the presence of U.S. forces in his homeland over the years.

Immediately, the political blame game erupted. President Trump accused “Sleepy Joe” Biden of allowing the man into the U.S. during Biden’s term. But others dispute that timeline, arguing that the individual may have entered the country during Trump’s first term.

As usual, political fog rose quickly. But the human tragedy came first.

A Week Like This Brings Back Other Alarming Incidents

When something horrific happens, our minds reach back, not to exaggerate the moment, but to understand it. This week’s tragedy inevitably reminded many of other recent acts of political violence:

The Murder of Charlie Kirk (September 10, 2025)

Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed this past September. Regardless of politics, it was a devastating act of violence against a young husband, a father, and a nationally recognized voice for millions of Americans.

The Minnesota Assassinations (June 14, 2025)

A masked gunman dressed as a police officer murdered Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman (a Democrat and former Speaker of the House) and her husband, Mark, in their home. The same attacker also shot State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, wounding them both.

The Hammer Attack on Paul Pelosi (October 2022)

David DePape broke into the home of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (then Speaker of the House of Representatives) and her husband Paul, assaulting Paul with a hammer. DePape admitted he wanted to “break her kneecaps” for what he believed were lies about Donald Trump. He is now serving a 30-year federal sentence plus a separate state sentence of life without parole.

The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi (2018)

Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the killing.

Despite that, on November 18, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was given a red carpet welcome the White House, complete with a ceremony that included a flyover of F-35 and F-16 fighter jets. This sparked renewed accusations of double standards when it comes to political violence and international human rights.

These events differ. Different motives. Different victims. Different political backgrounds. But they share one unmistakable truth: Political violence is not emerging.

It has already arrived. And it is not confined to one party, one ideology, or one demographic. It is everywhere.

Let’s Be Clear: There Is Never a Justification for Political Violence

Not against conservatives. Not against liberals. Not against immigrants. Not against public servants. Not against journalists. Not against commentators. Not against police. Not against elected officials. Not against anyone.

What This Means for Authors, Experts, and Thought Leaders

When America enters a moment like this, my inbox fills with messages that sound similar:

“Tom, I’m afraid to speak out. What if people attack me?

What if I say the wrong thing?”

But here is a truth I have learned after 40 years in media. You don’t defeat toxic voices by hiding your own. You defeat them by speaking with clarity, courage, and compassion.

If you’ve written a book…

If you’re building a nonprofit…

If you’ve lived through adversity…

If you’ve learned something that could heal someone else…

If you want to bring a bit more peace, or understanding, or hope into the world…

This is not the moment to pull back.

This is the moment to step forward.

A Practical Tip: Speak from Purpose, Not Position

Don’t lead with your position. Lead with your purpose. Positions divide. Purposes connect.

A position says:

“Here’s what I think — and here’s why you’re wrong.”

A purpose says: “Here’s what I’ve learned, and how it might help you.”

A Final Thought

Your wisdom, your lived experience, your hard-earned insight might be the very thing that lifts someone out of fear, anger, or confusion. But only if you share it.

My Invitation

• Join my “Ignite Your Media Influence” Private Membership and/or my “Substack Writers’ Group”

• Work with me privately, one-on-one, to help you connect with that wider audience and achieve that greater impact

Your voice matters. Your story matters. Your message matters.

And someone is waiting to hear it.

If you’ve been following the news this week (and for better or worse, I still follow it the way old producers breathe air) you may have noticed a theme that cuts right to the heart of how influence actually works in America.

It started with something almost unimaginable, six months ago: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene openly criticizing President Donald Trump.

For years, she has been one of his most vocal allies. But recently, she’s broken ranks, challenging him on everything from the administration’s focus on foreign policy to rising healthcare premiums in her district. She pushed for the release of the Epstein files and spoke up for the women who were abused. In return, he labeled her a “traitor” and began mocking her name.

She wasn;t the only one to “break ranks.” Last week, a number of prominent Democratic senators and congresspeople (including Sen. Mark Kelly) recorded a PSA reminding members of the military that they are not required to “follow illegal orders.” Trump labeled them traitors, too, even going so far as to invoke the death penalty.

The temperature is high. The rhetoric is extreme. And the question almost forces itself: Does dissent even matter anymore? Or has it become just another political performance, covered, argued about, dismissed, and forgotten?

It can feel that way, especially when the loudest voices drown out the most important ones.

But then something else happened this week. Something quieter, and far more revealing.

A Flicker of Common Ground Inside the White House

On Friday, New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, visited the White House. Based on their extremely critical comments about one another in preceding weeks, many expected a clash of ideologies. Instead, the two sides found surprising common ground, and even fielded Oval Office questions together.

The one issue that united them? The cost of living. Grocery prices. Rent. Everyday hardships.

The very things millions of Americans whisper to themselves late at night when they think about how they’re going to make next month work.

This was a reminder, and an important one: Dissent matters only when it connects to real life. Grandstanding doesn’t move people. Relevance does.

“What’s In It For Me?”: Lessons from the Good Morning America Pre-Show Meeting

During my years as a producer for ABC News Good Morning America, we had a daily story meeting each afternoon, as we prepared the sixteen segment for our show the following day.

And every single day, our executive producer, Shelly Ross, reminded us:

“The audience is asking one question: What’s in it for me?”

If a story didn’t answer that, it didn’t matter how important we thought it was.

If it didn’t touch someone’s life, it didn’t land.

This is the same principle behind the “No Kings” protests that swept the country recently. Detractors dismissed the protestors as “tie-dyed liberal wackos,” but millions showed up anyway, because the underlying issue resonated. People felt the message in their bones.

Relevance cuts through noise. Relevance builds connection. Relevance wins.

So What Does This Mean for Authors, Experts, Speakers, and Creators Like You?

A lot of people convince themselves that politics has nothing to do with their work. But this isn’t about politics. It’s about human attention, and attention is the currency that determines whether your message spreads.

Here’s the lesson:

If your work touches people’s real lives, they will listen.

If it doesn’t, they won’t.

You don’t need to be controversial. You don’t need to be combative. You don’t need to be loud.

You need to be relevant.

Offer something useful. Offer something actionable. Offer something human.

Our GMA executive producer Shelly Ross used to call them “nuggets.” A practical idea someone can use today, not someday.

Psychologist and author Robert Cialdini wrote about the principle of reciprocity in is book, Influence: When you help people (genuinely help them) they remember. They value your voice. They return to you again and again. And yes, when you eventually have a book? They buy it.

Let’s all remember the words of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Where You Can Practice This (Right Now!)

These are the principles I live by and teach every day in the communities I lead:

Ignite Your Media Influence: Private Membership

Where authors learn how to:
• Craft persuasive press releases
• Build a media target list
• Prepare for TV, radio, and podcast interviews
• Pitch journalists effectively
• And stay consistent enough to actually get results

The Substack Writers Group

A growing space where experts of every kind are finding their true audience, one helpful post at a time.

If you want details on either, send me a note. I’d be happy to share more.

A Final Word and a Thanksgiving Wish

In a moment when dissent seems to get swallowed by theatrics, this week gave us an unexpected reminder: Impact doesn’t come from shouting. Impact comes from relevance.

If you can speak directly to people’s lives (their hopes, fears, and daily frustrations) your message will travel farther than you ever imagined.

As we head into Thanksgiving week, I’m grateful to be writing here more often, and I hope you’ll check out the recent Notes I’ve been posting. I’ll keep showing up with ideas, encouragement, and practical tools to help you reach more readers and change more lives.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and keep sharing your wisdom. It matters more than you know.

For the past week, two very different political stories have dominated the headlines, each involving high-profile reversals. One concerned economic policy, as the hard line on proposed tariffs abruptly softened when the public made clear they were still feeling the strain of rising prices. The other involved a heated scandal involving moral transgressions that has captured national attention and led many to call for fuller transparency. After initially resisting, the public witnessed another abrupt reversal.

I don’t mention these examples to debate them or to persuade anyone of a political point of view. I mention them because they illustrate something every leader (and every storyteller) eventually learns:

You can have a confident plan, an airtight message, and a carefully crafted strategy… but if you’re not listening to the people you’re speaking to, you won’t get very far.

This isn’t a new lesson. It’s as old as politics itself.

James Carville, the legendary strategist behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, famously reminded his team, “It’s the economy, stupid.” He wasn’t insulting anyone. Instead, he was guiding them back to the truth: the public always tells you what matters most to them.

Good communicators listen. Great communicators adjust.

And the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that this principle has shaped my entire career, from the day I started in the CBS News Washington Bureau as a college student in the early 1980s, to my years producing for CBS Sunday Morning, to my work now supporting authors who want to reach a wider audience.

We Connect Through What We Feel, Not Through What We Defend

Tony Robbins tells a story I’ve always loved, about Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, competing in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, when the U.S. women’s gymnastics team was locked in a tight battle with the Russian team. She had injured her ankle. The entire world was watching. Could she muster the courage to complete her vault and secure the gold?

Most of us had never heard her name before that moment, but we knew exactly what she felt. We knew what it’s like to face something that hurts, something frightening, something deeply important.

We weren’t watching a vault; we were watching courage.

And courage (especially vulnerable courage) is universally magnetic.

The same thing happened again and again when I produced profiles of jazz musicians for CBS Sunday Morning. I realized that many viewers didn’t care about jazz at all. But they cared about the dream that began when a child picked up a trumpet at age seven. They cared about the father who inspired a daughter to practice late into the night. They cared about risk, reinvention, heartbreak, triumph.

They cared about humanity.

People don’t respond to the polish of a message. They respond to the beating heart inside it.

Listening Is an Act of Creativity

In public relations (the field I eventually transitioned into after many years in network news) people often talk about “spin.” That word has always made me uncomfortable, because the work I love doesn’t involve manipulating the truth. It involves discovering the truth someone is afraid to tell, or hasn’t yet found the courage to express.

I recall the times when corporate clients handed me annual communications plans early in my PR career, in 2004, when I was serving as media relations director for a prominent New York firm, Medialink Worldwide. While the proposed media plan may have been neatly typed and organized into bullet points, I often knew (based on my years as a producer) that our client’s plan was unlikely to resonate with the public. We always honored the client’s goals, of course, but we also gently shared our insight:

“This won’t land until you listen to what people actually care about.”

Listening is creativity. Listening is strategy. Listening is an act of service.

And listening is courage, because once you hear what your audience truly feels, you may need to change course.

The Memoirs I Love Working On Are Acts of Listening, Too

This year, I’ve been privileged to support several authors whose deeply personal stories required extraordinary bravery. One writer shared choices she made long ago (some wise, some painful, all honest) with the hope that readers might avoid the hardships she endured. Another chronicled her decades-long struggle to reclaim her health and find joy again after profound challenges.

Most readers don’t know these authors personally, but they know what it means to make a painful mistake. They know what it means to fight their way back. And they know what it means to hope that their story might help someone else.

That’s why memoir is such a generous act. It is, at its core, an act of listening: to one’s own life, one’s own wounds, one’s own wisdom.

And when an author listens to themselves, readers feel heard too.

The Creativity Principle: Listening Is the Bridge Between Your Message and Your Audience

You can be bold. You can be visionary. You can be passionate.

But if you’re not listening, truly listening, your message won’t land.

Listening tells you:

• what your audience fears

• what they hope for

• what feels out of reach

• what feels possible

• what matters now, not five years ago

Whether you’re a president adjusting a policy, an Olympic gymnast facing the vault of her life, a jazz musician honoring a childhood dream, or a first-time memoirist revealing long-hidden truths, the story only connects when you listen first.

Closing Thoughts — and an Invitation

I’ve spent 40 years studying how stories move people. From Paul McCartney to Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Buffett to Miles Davis, and Montana artist Russell Chatham, I’ve been privileged to learn from extraordinary creatives. Each one taught me something different about the art of connection. And I share the lessons I learned from each of them in my upcoming book, What the Camera Didn’t Capture: Wisdom All Around Us.

If you’d like to go further with this work, I’m building two communities designed specifically for people who want to share their message more boldly and more effectively:

Ignite Your Media Influence

A place to learn the do-it-yourself mechanics of earning media attention, from shaping your message to pitching journalists with clarity and confidence.

The Substack Writing Circle

A supportive community for writers who want to craft essays that resonate, inspire, and deepen their connection with readers.

And of course, I continue to work directly with authors who want hands-on PR support to grow their visibility and put their books in the hands of more readers.

If you feel called to reach a wider audience, to make a difference, or to finally tell the story inside you, I’d love to walk that path with you.

Because as Dr. Maya Angelou reminded us:

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

And there is no greater joy than finally sharing it.

“In playing ball, and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great.
When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.”
— Hank Aaron, Hall of Fame right fielder, Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves and Milwaukee Brewers (1954–1976)

Like millions of fans around the world, I watched in awe last night as the Los Angeles Dodgers captured the 2025 World Series title in extra innings, defeating the Toronto Blue Jays 5–4 in one of the most dramatic Game 7 finishes in history!

Believe it or not, it was the first extra-inning home run ever hit in a “winner-take-all” World Series game, a blast from Will Smith that sealed back-to-back championships for the Dodgers, making them the first Major League Baseball team in 25 years to win consecutive World Series titles! It was a night that reminded us all why baseball still matters.

Baseball has always been my favorite sport, though I’ll admit, I no longer follow every statistic the way some of my friends do. I envy their encyclopedic recall of every player and pitch. My love for the game goes back to childhood and young adulthood, when baseball was more than a pastime; it was a way to connect with my dad, my friends, and, later, my colleagues.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, our family moved from New York City to Baltimore, where my father served as managing editor of The Baltimore News-American. He took me to countless Orioles games at old Memorial Stadium, long before the fancy new Camden Yards became the city’s new jewel. Those were the Earl Weaver years, when the Orioles’ roster included legends like Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, and Cal Ripken Jr. My dad even managed to get World Series tickets in 1979 when the Orioles faced the Pittsburgh Pirates (and, alas, lost). This memory still feels vivid, half a century later.

Years later, during my college years, I enjoyed attending a few New York Mets games with my friend Diego, a passionate fan of the team, who had emigrated to New York during the golden “Tom Seaver” era, and has remained loyal to the team ever since. In 1986, we even managed to score tickets to a Mets World Series game, and the all-too-frequently hapless Mets actually won that series! The electricity of that crowd, the sea of blue and orange, and the collective belief that anything could happen! It’s a feeling that I’ll never forget.

When I joined CBS News, baseball even became part of my job. As an assistant producer for the overnight interview show Nightwatch, first in New York, then in Washington when Charlie Rose was named solo anchor of the show, with two hours or fresh interviews in the middle of the night, five days a week, one of my assignments was to attend games from the press box (rough assignment, right?), and then head down to the locker room after the final out to meet a player who’d agreed to join us for a live interview. That’s how I found myself shaking hands with Keith Hernandez of the Mets and Brooks Robinson of the Orioles, two of the classiest players ever to wear a uniform. Speaking of the Dodgers, during that same period, I also had the privilege of producing an interview with Dodgers legendary manager Tommy Lasorda, one of baseball’s greatest ambassadors and storytellers.

Also, in the early 1990s, while producing for CBS Sunday Morning, I worked on a story with humor correspondent Bill Geist about the “Tomahawk Chop” chant at Atlanta Braves games, long before teams began to rethink their names and traditions. During that shoot, I happened to see Ted Turner and Jane Fonda near the locker-room corridor, and I had the chance to introduce my dad to Bill. It’s one of those sweet, full-circle memories, two generations of baseball lovers meeting at the ballpark.

Here are five important lessons that we can all learn from the 2025 World Series:

1. Success Is Always a Team Effort

The Dodgers’ Game 7 win wasn’t about one superstar. It was about a team that trusted each other completely, from Shohei Ohtani, pitching on short rest, to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who came out of the bullpen on zero days’ rest to throw 43 pitches and close out the game.

Championships aren’t won by one person’s brilliance. They’re won by chemistry, faith, and shared purpose, qualities that apply just as much to creative work, journalism, or business as they do to sports. I’ve seen it again and again: when everyone contributes their part, the impossible becomes possible.

2. The Power of the Reset Button

Baseball teaches resilience like nothing else. You can strike out one inning, and be the hero the next.

Just ask Miguel Rojas, who hadn’t homered since September 19 … until the ninth inning of Game 7, when he tied the game with one of the most unforgettable swings in World Series history!

Rojas’ moment was a masterclass in staying ready, no matter how quiet the season has been. In life, as in baseball, the ability to press “reset” after failure makes all the difference.

3. Practice Makes Collaboration Look Effortless

The Dodgers’ flawless double plays in the Series (including the 6-4-3 that ended it all) were the result of years of shared discipline.

Watching that kind of wordless precision always reminds me of the newsroom teams I’ve been part of: editors, producers, and correspondents all moving in sync. When collaboration works, it looks almost effortless. But it’s never luck. It’s hours of practice, patience, and mutual trust.

4. You Can’t Rest on Yesterday’s Victories

The Dodgers became the first repeat champions in 25 years (the New York Yankees won three titles in a row, 1998-2000) but their journey was anything but easy. They endured injuries, slumps, and constant pressure.

Their story reminded me of a truth I’ve lived professionally: success must be earned anew each time. Even after winning an Emmy award as a member of ABC’s Good Morning America team for our coverage of the 9/11 tragedy or helping clients land major media coverage (like a laudatory Forbes article last week), I’ve learned that past triumphs can’t substitute for fresh effort. Each new season, each new project, demands its own excellence.

5. Celebrate Your Victories

When that final double play sealed the Dodgers’ victory, silver confetti rained down and grown men cried. Watching it brought back the joy of those Orioles games with my dad.

Baseball still connects me to him, to summer nights in the stands, scorecards in hand, and the unspoken bond between father and son.

Years later, I experienced that same joy as a father when I took my son Eric to a game at Yankee Stadium around 2010. He was about ten years old and proudly brought his catcher’s mitt, hoping for a foul ball. A few years later, when we lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I loved cheering him on during two seasons of Little League baseball. Eric wasn’t exactly a star player, but I was a proud dad on the sidelines, enjoying every moment. (Today, he’s a 24-year-old phi beta kappa college graduate and first-year law school student at Emory University. Atlanta, once again!)

It’s easy to rush from one goal to the next, always chasing what’s ahead. But this Series reminded me to pause, reflect, and celebrate the wins (big or small) along the way. Joy isn’t just in the achievement itself; it’s in recognizing how far you’ve come.

A Final Reflection and an Invitation

Every November brings both an ending and a beginning: the close of another baseball season and the promise of a fresh start.

Watching the Dodgers’ phenomenal victory rekindled my love for the game, and my belief that persistence, teamwork, and gratitude can carry us through any challenge.

As I look toward the end of this year, I’m channeling that same spirit into two new communities I’m launching:

• The “Ignite Your Media Influence” Membership, to help authors and thought leaders grow their visibility.

• The “Wisdom All Around Us” Private Group, a gathering place for people ready to share their stories and make a greater impact.

If this essay resonated with you, I’d love for you to join us … because, like baseball, your story is meant to be shared.

Patti Davis Reagan certainly spent more time inside the White House than I ever did, not to mention the thousands of staff members, journalists, and aides who have served there over the years. Still, when I saw the photos last week of the East Wing being torn down (walls gaping open, rubble spilling onto the lawn) I felt a surprising pang of nostalgia.

In a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, Patti Davis, the daughter of President Ronald Reagan, put words to what many of us felt when she said, “The images we’ve now all seen of the East Wing being demolished are heartbreaking. … But this is complete destruction.” She added, “Now no one else will get to walk across that threshold and feel the richness of that history brush past them.”

Her words brought back memories of another time in my life, when I passed through those gates nearly every day as White House correspondent for PBS-TV’s Nightly Business Report. It was 1988, and then–Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush was running for president. Washington was alive with the hum of transition, the measured optimism of a capital city that already sensed its next chapter being written.

I was in my late twenties, part of the junior press corps then, one of the reporters and producers who stood in the back of the James S. Brady Briefing Room, listening carefully, taking notes, watching how the veterans did it. Bill Plante, Andrea Mitchell, Sam Donaldson were there. These were the pros who seemed to glide effortlessly through the daily chaos. I was just grateful to be in the room, trying not to trip over the camera cables. (A year later, when I went to work for Charles Kuralt as CBS News Sunday Morning, I had the pleasure of producing a few stories with Bob Pierpoint, who had served as a White House correspondent for the network for several administrations.)

During the summer and early fall of 1988, I was often assigned to campaign stops, like the one in New Castle, Delaware, where George Bush went out on a small boat and pulled up lobster traps for the cameras, an image meant to show the future president’s connection to everyday working Americans. I also remember interviewing the President’s son, George W. Bush, in the campaign’s headquarters. During the interview, he was tossing around a baseball. In early 1989, George W. Bush announced that he was leading a group of investors to purchase Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers. Other days, I’d be back at the White House for briefings, covering cabinet nominations, like the one that introduced Senator John Tower, Bush’s pick for Secretary of Defense. (That nomination, as history remembers, didn’t end well.)

Back then, I couldn’t have imagined that decades later I’d be watching the building itself (a symbol of continuity and national identity, where I worked side-by-side with the network’s iconic anchor Walter Cronkite, one election night) reduced to dust and twisted beams. But time has a way of reshaping everything we once thought was permanent.

Maybe that’s why seeing the East Wing’s destruction stirred more than professional memories. It made me think of all the other Washington landmarks that have vanished or changed beyond recognition.

When I was in college at Georgetown, just half a mile west of the CBS News bureau, I worked nights waiting tables at the Crazy Horse Saloon on M Street, a smoky, lively place that’s now a Coach store.

The old CBS News Washington Bureau, where I got my first job in television at 2020 M Street, N.W., was the model for the film Broadcast News. That building, too, has been torn down and replaced by sleek glass and steel. (Back in 1986, I had a fun day serving as an “extra” for that award-winning film, standing at the bar, mere feet away from actor William Hurt of Nathan’s, an iconic Georgetown restaurant that is now a Capital One networking spot.)

The city I once knew feels like a memory playing on an old car radio, familiar but just out of reach.

And maybe that’s why you’ll frequently find me listening to The 70s Channel on SiriusXM. Almost every song brings back a memory from one of my favorite chapters of life, my teenage years in Miami, Florida, when my dad was deputy editor of The Miami Herald. We lived on Old Cutler Road in Coral Gables, just south of downtown and close to Matheson Hammock Beach. I loved that house. It is also now just a memory, torn down years ago and replaced by something far grander. My memories remain, of course: the shimmering surface of Hammock Lake across the street, the banyan trees arching over Old Cutler Road, the sound of cicadas on humid summer nights.

Like the East Wing, that old house is gone now. But the spirit of it (the sense of belonging, the awe of being young and hopeful) still lives in me. Every time I hear a familiar song from that era, I can almost see it again: the glow of streetlights through the banyans, the tall stacks of newspapers from around the nation that my father read every day to gather ideas for The Miami Herald, the hum of Miami in the distance.

Time takes away the buildings, but it leaves the stories. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Calling All Purpose-Driven Authors and Storytellers

If this essay stirred something in you (a memory, a place, a dream that still matters) maybe that’s your sign to start writing again.

Because here’s the truth: your story, your perspective, your wisdom are part of our collective history. The world doesn’t need more noise, but it does need your truth.

That’s why I’ve launched two communities designed to help you share your voice more powerfully and reach a wider audience:

• The Substack Writing Workshop: a weekly mastermind where authors and creators learn to refine their message, grow their audience, and turn their ideas into compelling, publishable essays.

• The “Ignite Your Media Influence” Private Group: a hands-on community that helps authors secure interviews, media coverage, and visibility for their work.

I’m looking for ten founding members for each group, at $49/month, an investment that locks in for life.

Are you ready to ensure your message doesn’t stay in the background? Do you want to share your story with the wider world? If so, then I’d love to help you take that next step.

Reach out, schedule a call, or send a message. Let’s make your story impossible to ignore.

Because time may take away the buildings, but it should never take away the voices that give them meaning.