6 Jun 2009
Reporters get stuck on the idea that there is a single, objective truth. As an editor I always knew better. [Carr was editor of Washington’s City Paper, among others.] Once you’re one step removed and you’re not the eyewitness, then you understand that things wobble and segment, sort of, according to their own agenda, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what actually happened.
—
David Carr
I think about the “single, objective truth” a lot. During my few months of “professional reporting” at The Sun I wrote some obituaries which highlighted the phenomenon starkly: I’d talk to someone’s mother and then their wife, or someone’s husband and then their daughter, and it was like they were talking about two radically different individuals. I suppose that’s also a commentary on how we all have many sides to our personalities, which circles back to Carr’s crazy life story.
Dumenco’s Media People: New York Times Columnist David Carr - Advertising Age
