Convocation | Charles Bethea

November 15, 2017

Independent journalist Charles Bethea took the stage in the Hitchcock Theatre on November 6 to try to answer this year’s inquiry question: “Is Truth Universal?” Bethea, a staff writer for the New Yorker as well as an independent journalist, drew upon his 10-year writing career to examine the difference between what he referred to as “journalistic truth” and “universal truth.”

Bethea, who began his career as a fact-checker for Outside magazine, knows about journalistic truth, which he defines as the truth of verifiable facts. He noted that our increasingly complex world calls for a mix of curiosity and skepticism and cautioned Cate students to not be “passive consumers of what pops up on our screens.” Bethea told fascinating stories about swimming with sharks for a story on shark repellent and about joining Kyle Korver underwater for four hours as they trudged through a 5K while holding 80-lb boulders for a story on challenge. Bethea is dedicated to journalistic truth, talking about the need to listen to as many voices as possible while doing research and about the months that he spent trying to verify the facts within the rambling narrative of a charismatic Georgia pastor imprisoned for swindling.

In spite of his long dedication to the facts, Bethea appeared equally dedicated to the truth he referred as “universal.” Quoting Picasso’s famous definition of art as “the lie that enables us to see the truth,” Bethea observed that novels often convey fundamental human truths about love and loss even if the facts in novels are verifiably false. Great novels, he said, have been in some sense “fact-checked” by society. As he noted, if they were not true in some way, we would not keep returning to them.

While he was on campus, in addition to Convocation, Bethea met with students at a reception hosted by El Batidor and the members of the club Writing Dangerously. Open about his experiences breaking into the field of journalism and his pursuit of truth both factual and otherwise, Bethea’s ideas are another perspective in the School’s yearlong examination of possible answers to the question “Is truth universal?”