In the end, it's all about character.

Of course, that may be said for anyone working in any industry, but it particularly applies to those who bring you the news. Some people say journalism is literature in a hurry. Some call it the first draft of history. More than ever before -- thanks to advancements in technology -- what it is is a living document that chronicles life on this planet, telling us what is happening, based on what we know right now. 

The pandemic enabled all of us to witness science roll out in real-time -- complete with incomplete information, erroneous assumptions, mistakes, and yes, the often mentioned "best guess" based on what scientists and doctors knew at a particular moment in time -- but had no time to test or verify, as time itself was and still remains a luxury no one can afford. Throughout it all, you hoped for the best: that the people who were making the judgment calls were doing so in the public interest -- and not responding to pressures of the industry, leaders, or politics.

Science announcing answers before a problem is even understood is very much like journalism bringing us breaking news based on unconfirmed reports by unnamed sources, isn't it?

In this regard, the pandemic in many ways mirrors what's been happening inside journalism for a long time now, and provides the public with an opportunity to view the industry of news in a new light. Thanks to science not having all the answers, people can now understand what it's like to work in news. 

Far too many polls give us the same results about what people think about the state of modern journalism. To bring you up to speed in a New York minute: recent polling history tells us public sentiment about the news has been waffling between "untrustworthy" and "more untrustworthy" for at least a decade. How news is created is not something the typical news consumer bothers to think about. Radio news just seems to fall out of the sky, and news articles just happen to be covered by headlines from start to finish.

It's the content, not the process, that adsorbs public attention. 

Inside each news story, a lot of judgment calls are made -- from what story to tell and which story to ignore, as well as what angle and sources to use. Each of these decisions is subjective, yet everything you've been told about news is that it's supposed to be objective. At least, it was, until opinion and news morphed together. You can't pin the blame on Mark Zuckerberg for this. So let's blame it on the Brits, who have long merged fact and opinion in their news. The British influence infiltrated the U.S. marketplace a few decades ago and maybe you didn't notice it then, but now it can't be unseen. 

While that's a problem for news today, it's certainly not the only problem. And at this moment in time, perhaps we'd all be better off if instead of surveying things like trust, we insisted on studying character. After all, doesn't character inspire trust?

It takes character to refuse to publish or broadcast a story before the facts are verified. It takes character to insist all sides of a story are told. It takes character to refuse a story based on a premise that was simply dreamed up by a reporter facing a hard deadline. And it takes a heck of a lot of character to ensure a story is balanced and fair when the people working on the story inside a newsroom have overstepped their bounds and decided who in that story is guilty, and who is innocent. 

Interestingly, the pandemic tested all of these issues inside journalism, but from a stage for all the world to see.