In my life I have watched communities, organisations, and entire countries lose their grip on truth. I was just starting my book publishing career in Yugoslavia in the mid-80s when the shared facts that held our society together for 40 years came apart, piece by piece, until people could no longer agree on what our country stood for, on its basic values and, finally, what was actually happening. Hundreds of thousands eventually died. Millions were displaced. Individual lives were ruined. Communities were left devastated, with shards of inhumanity and hurt that were bound to self-regenerate for generations.
Decades later, in South Africa, I was part of the opposite movement: a group of dogged journalists digging through the wreckage of state capture, one document at a time, until the theft could no longer be denied. That fundamental work was the very spark that helped pull the country back into hope and, ever so briefly, even optimism.
Those two experiences taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. A society that loses its grip on facts loses its grip on itself. A society that fights for truth can still find its way back.
That is what World News Day stands for, and why on 28 September more than a thousand newsrooms from over a hundred countries will mark it together.