Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Scratching My Head

Linda is in Georgia. Her father is sick and in the ICU. There have been a steady stream of calls today. First I had to figure out how to work the voice recorder on our new set of telephones. Once that was accomplished I brought my wife up to speed on all her local messages. There have been a steady stream.

Several blogs back I was thinking about journalism and how things get reported. It seems that the protocol is that all the facts need to be scrubbed before a journalist submits something. This is well and good if the facts are available however, when they aren't are we supposed to sit on our thumbs until all the facts are finally gathered?

A good case in point is the disappearance of flight MH 370. I wrote a number of blogs that used assumptions where the facts were unavailable. As long as the assumptions are clearly stated I see no problem in analyzing some of the possibilities. Assumptions have gotten a bad rap in recent years. A popular saying was they make an "Ass of You and Me." If you want to forecast the future assumptions are a virtual necessity. Anything with an element of futurity must be treated as an assumption since it hasn't happened yet. Then there are facts we have yet to establish and until they are discovered assumptions are one way of getting at the truth. For example Watson and Crick discovered the Double Helix playing around with a chemical model until all the pieces came together. Other scientists were taking a linear approach at the time, taking one fact at a time and the remarkable discovery they made was enabled by playing around with assumptions.

Why we don't see more of this process used in journalism leaves me scratching my head.