Wanting to destroy Marion and other myths

Gossip and rumors — they’re the stuff of small towns and, in many cases, small minds. They’re also the stuff of newspapers, though responsible journalists like those at the Record always check before reporting them and typically find most to be false.

A recent study subsidized by the National Institutes of Health — the type of study the Trump administration probably won’t pay for anymore — examined how what I like to call anti-social media has taken what used to be a minor problem and blown it up into a major one.

A group of researchers examined 330 rumors on Facebook and other anti-social media, concluding that it took seven times as long to dispel a false tidbit of information than it did to confirm a true one.

They also found that rumors and gossip spread far faster when the tidbits of information they contain were not proved to be either true or false, and that absent any proof either way, most people tended to believe them.

Their 11,789-word scholarly article, complete with fancy charts and mind-boggling measures of statistical significance, arrives at a simple conclusion: The best way to halt gossip and rumors is to be open and always tell the truth.

That’s something journalists love to hear. We wish officials and sources always would be open and truthful. We try to follow that advice in everything we publish, though sometimes we may not see the need to do it regarding our personal lives.

Last week, for example, we at the newspaper learned that a persistent rumor around town was that we had hired Emmy-winning documentary producer Sharon Liese of Herizon Productions to do a documentary about the disavowed raid on our office.

Truth is, she came to us right after the raid. We couldn’t afford to hire her even if we had wanted to. Her production costs, still not fully recovered by underwriting from several foundations with which we aren’t associated, undoubtedly will add up to more money than this newspaper company is worth.

She brought a huge crew to town for the first four days of last week and then followed me on Friday to Lenexa, where I was an invited speaker at a Rotary Club meeting.

If you think you see Sharon a lot, you have no idea how often she’s been around the rest of us. Even my cat knows her. Sharon tagged along when I adopted him from a shelter in Newton, and her crew made him a bit distrustful of strangers by shooting up-close-and-personal video of him while he was using a litter box at a family Thanksgiving dinner. He went into the box but wouldn’t come out until the lights and camera left.

I do have a contract with Sharon. I’ll show it to you if you want to see it. It involves no money changing hands either way except for a token amount — 1% of the net budget — to be paid by her to me if her film is accepted for airing.

In negotiations, we actually reduced this amount to the minimum allowed by film industry standards for someone agreeing to allow their “life rights” to be used by a producer. It’s sort of like how probate seems to require that all heirs get something, even if it’s only a token amount.

There is a provision that I could receive $100,000 to $250,000 if the project ever were transformed into a scripted, dramatic movie or TV series that would be based on, but not literally follow, fact. At one point, some production companies were interested in doing that, but I declined because I don’t want truth dramatized to the point that it’s not recognizable. And they couldn’t guarantee that George Clooney or Harrison Ford would play me.

I neither sought nor would I accept any form of editorial control over what Sharon does. For all I know, she could be making me out as some ignorant ogre who ought to be slammed into prison, and I would have no recourse if she did.

You might think that was stupid on my part, but Sharon is a journalist. And, as a fellow journalist, I never want to attempt to influence what any journalist reports other than to volunteer to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The only troubles Sharon and I have had are that I’ve been willing to talk to others as well as her.

She was concerned that the very good but much less extensive documentary the Wichita Eagle created (“Unwarranted: The Senseless Death of Journalist Joan Meyer,” available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmyZ6oTSWK8) might have taken some of the shine off her project.

She also was concerned last week that I consented to be interviewed for an also well-done but much less extensive two-part NPR podcast (Question Everything’s “Who’s Behind the Raids? A Mystery in Marion,” available at https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1258547263/question-everything-with-brian-reed).

Sharon’s investment in telling the story of the raid on our newsroom and homes is considerable. She had every right to worry if such projects, rather than whetting people’s appetites for more, might weaken her pitch to a leading pay-TV service to buy her documentary. But like my attorney, Bernie Rhodes, we’ve adopted a simple strategy about the raid. We’ll answer any question from anyone at any time because we — unlike some others — have nothing to hide.

I was talking about all of this Monday night with a couple of members of Marion’s city council. I asked why there also seems to be a persistent rumor that I retired to Marion to attempt to destroy the city. I pointed out how stupid it would be for a newspaper to want to destroy a community it serves and depends on.

One of them offered that people around town knew I had an unpleasant childhood and had frequently been bullied in school. This, of course, was news to me.

I recall only one incident of attempted bullying in my childhood. It was on a playground outside Bown-Corby School when I was in third grade. Another kid tried to bully me, and I scored points with classmates who saw the confrontation by calmly reaching out and shoving him to the ground.

I’m not proud I resorted to violence, but it did end the bullying. And, as one of the tallest kids in my class throughout school, I experienced nothing like it throughout the rest of my school years here.

Truth be told, I found my first 18 years in Marion to be quite pleasant. I loved that I could spend lots of time with family members, including two grandmothers who, rare for that time, were college-educated, working professionals.

I loved the woods, I enjoyed learning, and I particularly appreciated the opportunity to work at the newspaper.

I never thought of my school years as the highlight of my life. They were merely preparation for what came next. From having a toy press to working at the Record, I reveled in journalistic responsibilities. In short, I was one of those people about whom you can say, “Love what you’re doing, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

So there. We’ll see whether truth gets spread seven times faster than fiction on the gossip circuit in a town I returned to not to destroy it but to help pay forward the benefits it gave me during my youth. And we may find out whether the Trump administration was wise or foolhardy in canceling such things as studies of how rumors and gossip spread.

— ERIC MEYER