One Sunday morning, only a couple of weeks after finishing high school, I was awakened and told there was something in the newspaper I needed to see. Still half asleep, I stumbled downstairs to the dinning room and was handed a copy of The Washington Post. Perplexed, I thumbed through the pages wondering why I couldn’t just be told what it was (and why it couldn’t have waited until later). Finally, after the page on which there had been a piece written by the then-governor of California (a former Hollywood B-List actor by the name of Ronald Reagan), I saw what it was intended I should see. Covering nearly the entire page was a story I had written. To say I was stunned would be to understate the case.

The story had been written some months earlier as an assignment for my  English class. Not having started it until the evening after it had been due, I already had resigned myself to losing points for turning it in late. I sat at the dinning room table that evening writing as if possessed, and what was supposed to be a four-page paper ended as eighteen. Months later, there it was in the newspaper. Now, here’s the thing about that: no one had asked my permission or had ever said a word to me about having it appear anywhere outside of English class. Had anyone done so, maybe it would have been made clear that not one word of the story was true. Oh, the things I wrote about what was happening in the city at the time were quite true, but the “people” I “interviewed” on the mean streets of this city and the things they said were figments of my imagination. I had not ventured out onto any streets.

The editor’s note accompanying the story came with no disclaimer, so readers had no reason to disbelieve it, and they did believe. My first inkling of this was when an older cousin – worried that I might be sued if I hadn’t gotten people to sign release forms – asked “It’s not real, is it?” The question came as a surprise, as it never had once occurred to me that anyone would believe the story was anything other than fiction. That people thought it was true was beyond doubt when later that summer the daughter of a Post editor said to me in all sincerity “You must have been so brave!” (Yes. My befuddled silence was a lie of omission, but what teenage boy has the presence of mind to confess when confronted with compliments from a beautiful girl?)

You’ve read me long enough to know that present-day events are what lead me to things past. Some may find it naive or just downright stupid, but most of us still have the expectation that what we read in a reputable newspaper or magazine and what we see and hear on network news is true. We tend to feel this way despite the stories of former journalists like Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, Stephen Glass at The New Republic, Jayson Blair at The New York Times or the next to-be-named fabricator. What we read and hear, however, depends on what reporters are told by their sources, and a less than tenacious reporter might place undeserving trust in an untrustworthy source.

In recent days, that very situation has been vividly displayed. What people in Chicago had believed was true about the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald more than a year ago has been proven to be demonstrably false. What police told journalists was taken by most of them at face value, and those reporters passed it on to readers, viewers and listeners. Were it not for the Doubting Thomases among those journalists, or simply those who believe in double checking everything, Chicagoans and the rest of us would be none the wiser. What remains to be seen is will any wisdom be retained. Will reporters continue to give police the benefit of the doubt, or will they and their readers begin to dig deeper?

Here in Washington in 2007, we were subjected to a similar scenario. Two off-duty police officers, in the private vehicle of one, drove through a local neighborhood looking for one officer’s stolen minibike. They claimed they spotted it being driven, gave chase and were shot at by the driver. According to them, one officer returned fire. The result was a 14-year-old boy, DeOnte Rawlings, being shot dead in the back of the head. Both officers left the scene, one going home and the other to his mother’s house. No gun was ever found, and the minibike was found a few days later in Maryland. Among the differences between here and the Chicago shooting is the fact that the officer here was black and had grown up in the same neighborhood and gone to the same high school as the boy he killed. Also, the city settled financially with the family after the investigation was completed, a seven month probe by the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI which found the shooting was justified.

That finding, reported in the local newspapers, was the same as saying the dead boy was guilty. The grand jury testimony in the case was sealed, so reporters wrote what they were told. Working with juvenile offenders at the time and having sat through some of their trials, it was evident to me that – had DeOnte been tried in Court – there was not a judge on the juvenile bench who would have reached a finding of guilt. To the Post‘s credit, it ran my letter to its editor stating as much, offering its readers a perspective missing from its reporting.

The proverb referenced in the title has been kept alive for us through the ages in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allan Poe, and in that famous song by Motown writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. It should continue to serve as a reminder, that and what the Gershwin brothers said when they wrote “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”