Bret Stephens, in a column on the New York Times’s 1619 Project:
Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.
“The last word” is a specious concept that doesn’t exist except in fiction. (Besides, what if we’re wrong?) Everyone—not just journalists—ought to befriend lowercase truths, even when it’s hard. Or as Relient K puts it in “The Truth”:
I’ll put the emphasis on the evidence
Begging for the proof
Sometimes the hardest thing to believe is the truth
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