'Our crack team of experts assures us …'

How would you like to see this headline in tomorrow's newspaper: "Inter Lake hires team of doctors and scientists to inspect local restaurants."

I can assure you that you won't ever see such a headline, but one reader recently suggested he thought that's just what we should be doing. The reader was unhappy with a story we did about the county health department's inspection of a local restaurant. In his guest opinion, he argued that the inspection was poorly done and that the Inter Lake should have known it was poorly done.

The implication was that a newspaper like the Inter Lake ought not to report anything which it does not independently verify as true.

This would elevate the status of the Inter Lake to something like the ancient Oracle at Delphi, which would be nice. People would know they could open our pages to find out everything from where they should eat lunch (Bob's Pizza Shop, 56th and Wabasha) to whether or not there are weapons of mass destruction in countries of dubious distinction (dang, that one would have come in handy a few years ago).

This unfortunately would severely tax our resources (eight news reporters, five editors, three photographers, two news assistants, and three sports reporters or editors). To start with we would need a bureau in every major city in the world. While some of the photographers would probably start packing their bags tomorrow, a few more sedentary souls in the newsroom would probably complain about the change of school districts for their kids (where is Dubai again?).

But of course, just having a reporter on hand to check the accuracy of what we are told would not be enough in many cases. We would also need to hire a staff of experts on everything from DNA to virtual reality (Dr. Henry Lee meet Paris Hilton - oh wait, she is our expert on bad judgment). Before we reported the latest crash-test results on motor vehicles, for instance, we would need to spend millions of dollars on cars, trucks, crash-test dummies, a test facility, and crash-test smarties (the engineers who could tell us what it all meant).

Or maybe, just maybe, we can keep doing it the way we do it now, which is to find stories about interesting people doing interesting things and tell you about them. Of course, some of what people do that is interesting is not particularly pleasant. War, for instance, and murder investigations, for another - and yes, even restaurant inspections.

Some of what we report will be inaccurate, occasionally because we make a mistake, but far more frequently because we are reporting stuff that is happening now, right now, every day, up to and beyond deadline. It means today's theory may be tomorrow's trash. Information is slippery stuff, and though we follow standard procedures to keep it as accurate as possible, we also know - and expect our readers to know - that every "opinion" in the newspaper is subject to doubt, even the official ones of police authorities or bureaucrats.

Most of those people are highly qualified professionals, who take every precaution to make sure they know all the facts before they comment in the newspaper, but "facts" are slippery things, too. As the reader who didn't like our restaurant inspection story pointed out, a "mouse turd" may just be a leaf of Chinese tea. The question is, do you want to take the Inter Lake's word for it or the word of the people who are paid to do the inspections?

I suppose there is a certain amount of glamor in reporters poking through garbage cans looking for evidence of crimes, and certainly reporters are called upon regularly to ferret out information from government and public sources. But there is a limit to how much investigative journalism makes sense, or should even be tolerated.

After all, the underlying premise of investigative journalism is that if you pick up enough rocks, you will eventually find something disgusting under one of them. The trouble is that if you spend too much time looking at the "dirt" under the rocks you just might miss the world under the "dirt." Turns out there is a whole planet out there, full of interesting stories that don't need to be investigated; they just need to be told.

To me, that's the fundamental mission of journalism - to make a record of the world we live in day by day. The word journalism in fact comes from the Latin word diurnalis, and literally suggests the intent of keeping a daily record.

That task, as you might well expect, is formidable. If done well, it leaves little time for "muckraking," as investigative journalism was once known. And besides, "muckraking" can be dangerous when it is done with an agenda. Sometimes, "truth seeking" reporters approach stories with a sanctimoniousness that makes you think they should come to work in white robes.

Here at the Inter Lake, you will not see too much of that, I hope.

As much as possible, we want to report the news, not make it. We will do that by covering your friends and neighbors, your cities and neighborhoods, your schools and your legislators. From time to time, we will even cover a restaurant inspection if it rises to the level of general interest.

When that happens, we hope you will judge us not by what the inspector from the health department said, but by how well we told the story. Did we make clear what the importance of the inspection was? Did we tell both sides of the story, allowing a chance for rebuttal if warranted? Did we explain the process used in the inspection? Did we follow up so that our readers were informed when the restaurant got an excellent rating at its next inspection?

I think if you go back you will see that we did all those things.

The Inter Lake, you see, has no stake in whether or not a particular restaurant passes its health department inspection or not. But the public does have a stake in knowing what the health department is doing on its behalf. In this case, the newspaper's role was simply to pass along to the public what county officials were doing as employees of the taxpayers. If the taxpayers don't like it, then they should do something about it.

But it's not up to the newspaper to withhold the story from the public, and it's certainly not up to us to do our own independent inspection of the restaurant's kitchen. That would go well beyond the function of the newspaper as a place to get information, and turn us into outright busybodies.

I'm perfectly willing to let the national media have the corner on that market.