Facts matter, but character matters even more

On Walter Cronkite, Vacation Bible School, and the need to put our appetite for facts in perspective

Lester Holt has stepped down from the anchor chair at the NBC Nightly News after ten years of tenure, leaving with the kind of brief valedictory address. His editorial comment was compact, limited to, "Facts matter, words matter, journalism matters, and you matter. Over the last decade, we have shared some dark and harrowing days and nights from our country: The pandemic, mass shootings, natural disasters. Each testing our resilience and our compassion."

■ Facts do matter, to be certain. But the thing that objective journalism can't help us address is that character and honor matter even more than facts. The utility of facts is limited, but the utility of character is infinite: Lots of decisions have to be made with incomplete information, but none should be made with disregard for honorability.

■ There's no substitute for character development, and there's no way to institutionalize it, either. It has to be developed through one-on-one guidance, usually between a young person and an older one who cares enough to invest time and patience in them. Institutions can and should be used as adjuncts in the process of character formation, being useful in many ways for reinforcing principles already adopted through one-on-one development. But a parent can't send a wayward kid off to Vacation Bible School and expect them to return as the Pope.

■ Talk (and a lot of hype) over artificial intelligence has flooded the public consciousness, promising unlimited access to facts -- or at least things posing as facts. But even if we stipulate the premise that artificial intelligence may give us more information, there's no such thing as artificial character. Even if machines grow to mimic human intelligence, their only values will be the ones trained into them by human choices.

■ Eons of humans have lived with incomplete access to data and facts, yet most of them have still lived good and honorable lives. We need to be humble about just how little we actually know -- or will ever know -- and realize that our grasp of facts will always be limited.

■ Walter Cronkite didn't do us any favors by saying, "That's the way it is": More like, "That's as much as we thought we could figure out, given the limited resources we had". We will always make mistakes, subject to bad, missing, misleading, and misinterpreted information. But even without a complete grasp of the facts, we should still endeavor to eliminate mistakes of character.