Forty-some years ago, when we were writing our textbook, Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story, my colleague Dan Noyes and I described what we called the hypothesis-driven method of journalism.
It’s a tricky business, this hypothesis methodology. You’ve got to have some basic evidence that indicates a pattern plus a suspicion, an instinct, a guess about what you’ll find as you keep searching.
But a hypothesis is not the same as a conspiracy theory, and you don’t publish your hypothesis. You use it, just like a scientist would, to investigate where the truth lies. We understand that this may frustrate true believers who wish reporters would just substantiate their theories.
An example historically is the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. Perhaps no other event inspired more complex yet largely unfounded theories.
How could something like this have happened without a conspiracy? As years passed, even though no credible evidence emerged to substantiate any of the wilder theories, certain individuals continued to stoke the conspiracy fires and keep them burning.
Oliver Stone exploited this more skillfully than most, imagining how the conspiracy might have unfolded in his movie, “JFK”, which has shaped subsequent generations’ views about the event. That he patched in real footage, including the Zapruder footage that is the only known visual evidence of the shooting, made his docudrama feel more realistic than it actually was.
As a result, if you ask people, say, in their 50s or younger today about the assassination, they probably believe we all witnessed it on television as it happened. But that is incorrect: Nobody saw it on TV, because there was no live coverage of Kennedy riding in his motorcade at all. In fact we never saw any video evidence until a full decade later, when the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s head exploding was finally declassified and released to the public.
All of this only complicated the effort of journalists like me who actually tried to investigate the assassination. Maintaining our commitment to stick to the facts is not as sexy as publishing fantasies based on conjecture. But all we can do is stay alert and adjust our hypothesis in light of any new evidence as it emerges. We can’t afford to get wedded to any one hypothesis until and unless the preponderance of evidence becomes obvious.
Otherwise all you end up with are conspiracy theories.
To this day, whether someone else in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald was behind the Kennedy murder remains unproven. And that is the truth.
(This is an edited version of an essay I’ve published previously.)
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Well done, David. You perfectly capture the fine journalistic line between preliminary thesis and undocumented conspiracy theory in all of its intricate twists and turns. Alas, these subtle and necessary distinctions are entirely lost in a world that regards unsourced news-feeds on facebook and X as "journalism."
As Sgt Joe Friday said, “Just the facts ma’am”