Page 105 of Head Room

“Not a lot to laugh about these days.The people who fall for conspiracies think every journalist is in on it — with a differentitfor each conspiracy believer.Instead of following Occam’s razor, they swallow convoluted conspiracies, swallowing whole the results of Brandolini’s law.”

“Brandolini—?Oh, the bullshit asymmetry principle.”

“That’s it.Named after programmer Alberto Brandolini who, the story goes, came up with it while watching an interview with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.”

“Convicted of tax fraud,” I contributed about Berlusconi.

“And still elected.Brandolini recognized that creating and spouting bullshit takes little effort—”

“And no thought.”

“—while refuting it entails effort that’s orders of magnitude greater.”

“Because the bullshit creator wings it, unrestrained by aligning with reality or facts, while the refuter researches, checks, and crafts a response.”

All of which applied to scammers.Might use that inHelping Out!

Orson shifted in his chair.“You do know this is a crazy idea Mike and you are trying to put together.It’s going back to the days of apprenticeships, except the whiz kids you want to hire have degrees and think they know everything already.Why would they come to the smallest market in the country?Not only do they not get the newest and shiniest equipment—”

KWMT was well behind most stations in that category, even with Mike’s improvements.

“—but they’d also get old crocks telling them how they did things back in the day.That’s me, not you, Elizabeth.”

“What truly worries you about taking on this job, Orson?”

He squinted at me.

“The tech.The lingo.The visual requirements.The time constraints on telling the story.None of that’s my native language.”

“Telling the truth is the same.Finding the core of a story is the same.Ensuring you have the necessary facts is the same.The rest?You’ll become fluent.Talking about old crocks, I recently complained about being a tech fossil and artifact compared to these kids.”

“You?You came up in this arm of the biz.”

“Then they replaced that arm with robotics.”

He snorted in amusement.

“It’s shifting from specialists in individual aspects of newsgathering to everybody’s a one-man band with expertise in everything,” I continued.“How can I compete with that?”

“You don’t.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“You don’t need to compete with that.Not only because the owner holds you in the highest possible regard, but also because you have the guts to investigate, the smarts to find out, the determination to put it all together.The others have potential for that, but you’ve honed it.You give them the goal to shoot for with all their tech wizardry.You know what makes a good story and how to make it a great story.”

I took in his words for a beat, okay, maybe two, because they felt warm and luxurious flowing over me.

Then I looked up at him.“So do you.”

Silent at first, he then said, “I see what you did there, E.M.Danniher.Neat.Very neat.”

I let that compliment slide by.

“A couple days ago I was thinking about wanting to talk to Nola after a story she did.Not about the journalism.About her, the person who saw what she saw.”

He knew without hearing more.“The fire scene with the body.Yes, there are things we can teach them about journalism, about their lives as journalists, even about life in general.”

He clapped his hands on the arms of the chair as he rose.