We Quit Checking and Called It Honest

Cedar Valley News
June 1, 2026
We Quit Checking and Called It Honest
By Teresa Nikas

Last week I held the paper twenty minutes to make one phone call. An obituary carried a man’s middle name; the spelling looked wrong to me, and I would not let the page print until I knew.

The young man who lays out our pages asked why it mattered. The family would not notice, he said. Nobody reads the middle names. He was probably right about the noticing. I made the call anyway.

The funeral home confirmed the spelling in nine seconds. I had been wrong. The name was right as written. We let it stand, the paper went out, and the man kept his own name. Nine seconds. The young man had his coat on the whole time, waiting by the press. I have made some version of the call for thirty years, and lately I feel like the last person in the county still making it.

This spring a legal researcher in Paris named Damien Charlotin finished a count he had been keeping. More than 1,400 court cases, here and in other countries, in which a lawyer or a person representing himself filed a brief built on cases that do not exist. A machine had invented the citations. Nobody read them before they reached the judge.

The lawyers were caught because a judge checks citations for a living. The courtroom may be the last room in the country where someone still reads to the end before he signs his name. The rest of us have no judge. We have a phone in our hand and a button which says share.

And the machine has changed what a lie looks like. The old lie was clumsy and you could feel it. The new one arrives clean. It is spelled correctly. It carries a citation, a date, and a confident sentence. It looks finished, and a finished thing does not invite a second look. The eye trusts a clean surface and moves on. We have built a country of things which look checked and are not. We forward them faster than we could ever check them.

A few weeks ago someone in our own Facebook group wrote the elementary school was cutting its music teacher. It was not true. A meeting had been scheduled, nothing more. But the post traveled the length of Cedar Valley in an afternoon. A mother I know kept her boy home from the spring assembly, sure his teacher was already gone. The correction came the next morning and reached a fraction of the people. The ones who shared the first thing did not share the second. They were not lying. They simply never went back.

One of the lawyers in the Paris count was sick the week it happened, racing a deadline to keep a man from being deported. He reached for the machine, he did not check what it gave him, and the court found the quotations were false. Then he did the rare thing. He admitted it the same day. He did not blame a clerk or the calendar. He said, plainly, he had not looked. The court fined him a little and made a point of the honesty.

Here is what I have come to believe. The dishonesty of this moment is not mostly lying. Lying is work. Ours is quieter and easier. We pass a thing along without reading it. When it turns out false, we do not go back. Somewhere in the passing, we began to call the unchecked thing honest. We did not lie. We only failed to look. We have confused not being caught with telling the truth.

An honest person is not one who is never wrong. I have been wrong in print more times than I will list here, and every week this paper runs a small box near the back where we say so by name. The box is the most honest thing we print. It is the nine-second phone call, made too late, and made anyway.

So here is the small thing I would ask of you. Before you pass it on, read it to the end. Make the call you are sure will not matter. The family will never know you checked. Check anyway.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a small thing you stopped to check — and what you found when you did. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Damien Charlotin, his database of AI-hallucinated citations in court filings, and the court sanctions described are real.

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