“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate purportedly asked as he washed his hands of the matter at hand.

While apparently intended then as dismissive rhetoric, that question today is central to how we view our world and to how we try to solve its problems. And it is a question at the very core of every news publication.

All news media want you to believe they are telling the truth. At least one source gives readers a daily reassurance on every front page: while in Central America this summer I saw a Honduran newspaper with the tagline, “La verdad en las manos” - “The truth in your hands.”

Few reputable news media deliberately lie; altruism aside, there are usually independent means of verifying facts. But “facts” are not the same as “truth.” While facts may be as obvious as an elephant in the living room, the “truth” becomes a greased pig when someone smears those facts with bias. Unfortunately, bias can be very hard to detect; it can be as subtle as simply not reporting a fact.

“Truth” is a paradox. Five witnesses to a bank robbery can give police a detailed account of what they saw, each of them believing they are delivering the absolute truth, and yet police will find that their stories contain wild contradictions. This is the fallacy of “truth,” and it is well illustrated by the comment of a fictional TV character. In the X-Files episode titled Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Detective Scully asks Chung, a writer investigating a UFO incident, how he is going to find the truth among the conflicting stories of the witnesses. He tells her that it is impossible. “The truth,” he said “is as subjective as reality.”