The Great Escape!

Consider the Source

What a ridiculous old newspaper story — and, later, losing my father — taught me about the truth.

Years ago, back in college, my path took an unexpected turn. I was two semesters from graduating as a dance major when health problems forced me to set aside my advanced classes, and I pivoted toward a degree in Marketing Communications instead. It felt like a detour at the time. Looking back, I learned valuable lessons from those classes that shaped how I built companies, and communicated with others.

For a project in one of my marketing and advertising classes, I set out to study how the newspapers of the 1800s had covered the early days of my church. I mapped the big events — the publication of the Book of Mormon, the westward exodus, the completion of the temples — and then I sat down with reel after reel of microfiche, reading how the papers of the day had reported it all.

What I found was equal parts hilarious and troubling. (My teacher, bless her, was so tickled by the research that she gave me an A++ — with an exclamation point.)

Sixteen miles of impossible

There was one line I have never been able to forget. A newspaper of the era reported, with a completely straight face, that the Mormon women were "jumping from the Salt Lake City Temple into the Great Salt Lake to escape their captors."

Now, let me tell you a little something about geography. The temple in question stands in downtown Salt Lake City. The Great Salt Lake sits about sixteen miles to the west. You could no more leap from that temple into that lake than you could dive off a building downtown and land in a reservoir a half-hour's drive away. It was pure invention — part of a whole popular genre of lurid "captive women" stories that sold papers by the stack. And there it was, printed as fact: something not just false, but physically impossible. I laughed. And then I got a little chill, because I realized how confidently the press can hand you something that simply isn't true.

Then it stopped being funny

I learned the very same lesson again years later, in a way I couldn't laugh at.

When my father died, things were said in the media about him, and about his death, that were absolutely false. I couldn't bring myself to listen to any of it at the time; my siblings were deeply wounded by what was printed. So I did the one thing within my power — I sat down and wrote my own letter, published in the paper: my story, about the father I knew and loved. Many people called afterward just to say thank you.

It was a full year before I could gather the courage to read what the media had originally said. When I finally did, I could barely stomach it. I wrote to the agencies involved — and, to their credit, they sent back an apology. But the whole experience carved something into me: the truth takes patience. It takes time, and the willingness to gather every fact, and a genuine effort to set your own angle aside. And here's the hard part — the real, whole truth is very often less sensational, less flattering, and far less clickable than a convenient half-truth. Which is exactly why the half-truth so often gets printed instead.

How I read now

Ever since, I've tried to be a careful reader. Before I believe a thing, I've learned to ask two quiet questions: Who is telling me this? And what do they want me to believe?

Because everyone writes from somewhere. That was true of a nineteenth-century editor selling scandal by the column-inch, and it is every bit as true today — of a headline built to make you click, of an advertiser, and of advocacy groups and corporations on every side of every issue. When money is involved, it's worth gently following it: who funded this study, this article, this "expert"? And that goes for all sides — the big company with something to sell and its well-funded critics. (I've written separately, and much more carefully, about the GMO and Monsanto debate specifically, if that's the rabbit hole you're after — but the habit of mind is the same one: consider the source.) Fact-checking tools can help you see who's behind a message; just remember they carry leanings of their own, so it's always wise to check a claim against more than one honest set of eyes.

None of this is meant to make you cynical. Quite the opposite. Learning to spot what's false has only made me treasure what's true — and hungrier to find it.

It isn't always fashionable to talk openly about God in a workplace, so a friend and I have a running little joke. When one of us is handed something hard, we grin and say, "May the Force be with you." It gets a laugh — but underneath the joke, I mean something real by it. It's my quiet, slightly cheeky way of pointing to the One I actually turn to when I'm searching for the truth of a matter.

Back when I served as a missionary, I always invited people to pray, so they could come to know the truth for themselves. One day a woman surprised me by turning the invitation down. Puzzled, I asked her why. "I don't need to," she said. "I can already feel that what you're telling me is true."

I think about her often. Because that, in the end, is the thing no headline can give you and no correction can take away: truth has a way of resonating, quietly and unmistakably, in an honest heart. So read carefully. Check your sources. Be patient for the whole story. And when it matters most — may the Force :) be with you.

Lots of love to you and yours,

Steffanie