Story Out of Place

Libraries, on the one hand, are places to find hard facts, the truth of a matter in proven historical or scientific terms. They are also places to find enjoyable and self-fulfilling stories, often fiction, sometimes inspirational, maybe all in one bite. Except for the fiction part, daily TV news reporting fits the description, too, but bites can sometimes unduly lean to the latter rather than the former even while trying to track a truth. I think that I recently experienced just such an example in person.

A Pittsburgh TV camera crew was in town one morning to get material for the imminent closing of an IGA grocery store, a central fixture for many years in its community. I happened to be in the store at just the slow-patronage moment that the crew was in search of interviewees. I became one among just a few.

But, I did not make the grade on the cutting room floor, because, I suppose, my story did not fit the preconceived narrative headline. That is my conclusion after having seen the actual broadcast headline and piece as televised that same day. The story was cast only as a sad loss of an institution that had come to be a warm and convenient part of life for some residents of the community. And that must certainly be true; three of them said so in the televised interview.

But there is the other angle, which I represented, the one that got left out. It is that time and business models have moved on for smallish grocery stores, which this one was, and the models now include shared, lower cost benefits from large-volume, chain-store buying, as well as featuring pre-prepared dinners and perks linked to gasoline purchases elsewhere. My own verbal “shrug” to the TV interviewer was along those lines. Not the story that she and the station had in mind. So, they told an incomplete story, not a whole one.

That is OK perhaps, although I am inclined to regret that the TV station missed a bigger news opportunity. And that is what takes me back to Libraries.

Libraries, if you know how, are places to do literature searches to build factual cases uncorrupted by preconceived aims, belief systems, and/or innuendo. Thesis building is different than beginning with an observation and conclusion and cherry-picking for a narrow, or even wrong, case. True scientists, historians, and good lawyers know how to do this, because learning how to is at the core of their professional beings.

And good news reporters should know how as well, and do (see the Washington Post on a similar closing-store theme, August 25, 2024). The WLN and Library world generally have built supportive capacity over years, as has been many times discussed in this column. My applause for those who use it, and regrets for those who do not.

Above all, the best you have to offer is to not ignore the whole storyline, and to tell it with supportable facts. Libraries, public and special, are there to help.