“Truth is always the strongest argument.”

— Sophocles
 

Words have power. They can move people.

We were made keenly aware of this last Wednesday when we had an impromptu conversation with the superintendent of the Guilderland public schools, Marie Wiles. We had called to find out the cost of a new play area that had been officially opened that day. We were looking for information to run with the pictures our photographer, Mike Koff, had taken.

Instead, we heard a lovely story that seemed to us almost an allegory.

“It started as a writing assignment,” said Wiles. Pine Bush Elementary School teacher Laura Ockerman had given her students a task: Write a persuasive essay.

“The students decided to help their friend who wasn’t able to play with them on the playground,” said Wiles. “They put together a research team. They talked to students with disabilities to see what would be needed.”

One of the people their work was presented to was Clifford Nooney, who is in charge of buildings and grounds for the school district. We’ve lauded him in this space before because he listened to transgender students when they spoke of their need for privacy in school bathrooms and helped to make gender-neutral bathrooms a reality at Guilderland.

“Flash forward to June,” said Wiles. “I got a call from Senator Amedore. He said, ‘I have some additional member-item funds. I need to know right now if you have a way to use them.’”

Wiles happened to be at a meeting with the district’s safety committee, with Nooney in attendance, when she got the call. “Cliff said, ‘The playground,’” she recalled. Ten-thousand dollars were secured for the project.

“Cliff and his crew went to the races to get it installed,” said Wiles, referencing two months of excessive heat and near-constant rain this summer.

Wiles took comfort in this last Wednesday, the day after a $43 million capital project to upgrade Guilderland’s seven schools had been narrowly defeated. Wiles had seen kids in the new play area laughing and playing together that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. She described their “pure joy.”

“We have great teachers, shaping the lives of kids who are running with the ball — to help others,” she said.

The “pure joy” we realized had come about because of the power of words. Because those Pine Bush children had done their research and set down their thoughts in writing and presented them to someone who listened, they were able to effect change for the good.

This led us to reflect on the words that helped lead to the capital-project defeat. Before the vote, Michael Conners, Albany County’s comptroller, had started the groundswell of opposition. He had held a press conference outside Guilderland High School, criticizing the district for scheduling the vote for Oct. 16 instead of Nov. 6, calling it a “secret” election and saying it was “un-American,” and concluding he would vote “no,” not on the project’s merit, but because of the “abysmal” process used.

After the election, Conners expressed his pleasure at the defeat and urged support of a bill he said would “put an end to these voter-suppression elections.”

The problem with his words? They weren’t true.

That bill, if it were law, would have allowed a school vote on Oct. 16, the day Guilderland held its vote, but not on Election Day. As we’ve written here before, the county board of elections said a school vote on Election Day couldn’t work. The boundaries are different for towns and school districts; there would be no way to verify votes.

Other words moved people in last week’s election, too — words on a last-minute flier, written anonymously, and circulated on social media — many of which were alarmist and misleading.

As we’ve written here before, we have no quarrel with honest “no” votes. If you live in a $326,000 house in Guilderland — the median price for the district — and cannot afford the $8.58 a month the project would have cost you had it passed, or if you think upgrades to security, technology, and systems like plumbing and heating aren’t worth it, you should certainly vote “no.”

That’s different than voting “no” because you were told the process was “secretive” or “un-American’ when, in fact it was transparent and inclusive. Any one of the last-minute anonymous objectors could have spoken to the school board about concerns as part of the months-long process.

Voting out of anger spawned by false words puts us all in peril.

It’s a national problem. The entities that used to produce the news — newspapers, and television and radio stations — also used to distribute the news directly to their audiences. Today, citizens often get their news through social media, and incorrect information can be willfully distributed.

On Friday, the same day the United States accused a Russian woman of trying to secretly sway Americans in the upcoming midterm elections — using tactics similar to those revealed by Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election — American intelligence officials released a statement asserting Russia, China, Iran, and other countries are working to influence voters and policy in the United States.

Quality journalism balances power by accurately researching and reporting. But democracy requires not only quality journalism but citizens who are willing to invest the effort to distinguish between true reports and false ones.

Fact-checking websites can help us and they’re worth consulting when you have doubts. (Full disclosure: The Enterprise editor’s daughter Saranac Hale Spencer, who started her journalism career at The Enterprise, is a reporter for factcheck.org). But the fact-checkers, no matter how diligent, can’t keep up with the billions of posts generated daily nor with the troll farms set up to wreak havoc with the system.

The Newseum in Washington, D.C. has come up with a mnemonic — ESCAPE — to help us judge the authenticity of stories. Each of us, as United States citizens seeking to be accurately informed, should ask ourselves these questions as we read news:

— Evidence: Do the facts hold up? Look for information you can verify like names, numbers, places, and documents;

— Source: Who made this and can I trust them? Trace who has touched the news story: authors, publishers, funders, aggregators, or social-media users;

— Context: What’s the big picture? Consider the whole story and weigh other forces surrounding it like current events, cultural trends, political goals, or financial pressures;

— Audience: Who is the intended audience? Look for attempts to appeal to specific groups or types of people. Consider image choices, presentation techniques, language, and content;

— Purpose: Why was this made? Look for clues to motivation such as the publisher’s mission, persuasive language or images, money-making tactics, stated or unstated agendas, and calls to action; and

— Execution: How is this information presented? Consider how the way it is made affects the impact, looking at such things as style, grammar, tone, image choices, placement, and layout.

We would also advise reading across platforms for the broadest view and, when you are reading a publication like ours — where we go to great pains to label opinion and analysis as separate from objective news reporting — paying attention to the labels.

Words are, indeed, powerful. If they are carefully researched with names behind them, like the words written by the Pine Bush students, they can move us forward. The students’ words were meant to be persuasive, and they were.

But to ESCAPE untruths, consider the safeguards outlined by the Newseum. Vote on Nov. 6 having pondered those points in the election profiles you read.

Our democracy depends on educated readers.