“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.”

If “truth” is then a matter of subjective experience, then perhaps we can arrive at the “truth” by viewing as many perspectives as possible. Here, we want to show you other perspectives of the “truth” you believe you already know. We do that, not with redundant news reporting - that’s already well-covered in our community - but with news stories.

Read It Here is a new philosophy in news reporting and a new way of doing  journalism. Besides being a local news story magazine, what makes us different from your other  local news sources?

-Two-way communication. Welcome to the 21^st century - we’re glad you made it! Because Read It Here is primarily online, you get to participate in journalism by offering your own truth, your own perspective. At the end of any article click on the link to add your own comments and experiences - and to broaden your own understanding by viewing the perspective of others.

Being online also allows us to illustrate stories with video and audio clips, as well.

-Perspective. Again, we want to show you that every truth has multiple facets and that other people may see your favorite truth from a different angle. Learning other perspectives broadens our understanding, understanding encourages tolerance and we must tolerate each other if we are to live harmoniously together.

-Good news. We are facing serious issues, both locally and globally; news sources routinely report them, but they also routinely fail to report a positive perspective or they fail to report good news altogether. A constant diet of bad news promotes a constant sense of unease. When we are uneasy we lose our sense of community and become insular, which doesn’t allow us to understand or tolerate each other.

-Bad news. Conversely, and far too common, for political or economic reasons news sources also fail to report the negative side of an event. By the time the public learns of the down side of an issue, it’s too late. For example, remember how Prop 301 proponents said it would give money to schools by raising the state sales tax? Most Arizonans still don’t know that public schools are at the bottom of a list of 11 recipients for that money, and that schools only get the leftovers after everyone else gets their cut. That’s why we are still 49^th among the 50 states for K-12 spending.

-The best outdoors section of any publication in Arizona. Hiking, biking, hunting, shooting sports, camping, fishing - everything from hang gliding to scuba diving, and the issues that may impact the things we love to do, are right here.

-A focus on sustaining our community. Social issues are not separate from economic issues, and neither of those are separate from environmental issues. They all tie together, impacting one another, and a solution to one problem is very likely to create another problem elsewhere. To be healthy and sustainable, we must have social, economic and environmental balance. Are we there yet?

Read It Here is also about hope and positive outcomes. We don’t want you to close our window or put down our pages feeling discouraged, anxious or overwhelmed by “that’s-the-way-it-is” bad news; you get enough of that from the other media. Come here to learn about solutions, too, to be inspired to act rather than just observe and to learn about those many perspectives to a single truth.

Speaking of which, here’s one more perspective on “truth”for your consideration; it’s one of my favorites and, judging by the bias, you can guess the vocation of the speaker:

“The only real truth is physics - everything else is just opinion.” 

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