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When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later
When Truth Mattered is a gripping, authoritative account of a young editor and his staff painstakingly pursuing the truth of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970—a tragedy that has haunted the nation for 50 years and significantly changed the debate about the Vietnam War.
The editor, Robert Giles, takes you inside the turmoil and drama of the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom on that fateful day, and on campus at Kent State University, a Midwestern college under siege. The heart-pounding story captures the flash of National Guard rifles, the bloody aftermath of four students killed and nine wounded, and the stress of reporters hurrying to sort fact from fiction for a horrified world wanting to know "what" and "why."
The Beacon Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage created a truthful narrative that has stood unchallenged and unchanged for five decades. It also provides an urgent lesson for today: What is the role of truth in media? Can you trust the news that you're hearing and seeing? If not, how do you equip yourself? When Truth Mattered shows how journalism was done right ... and how those standards must still be applied today.
The editor, Robert Giles, takes you inside the turmoil and drama of the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom on that fateful day, and on campus at Kent State University, a Midwestern college under siege. The heart-pounding story captures the flash of National Guard rifles, the bloody aftermath of four students killed and nine wounded, and the stress of reporters hurrying to sort fact from fiction for a horrified world wanting to know "what" and "why."
The Beacon Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage created a truthful narrative that has stood unchallenged and unchanged for five decades. It also provides an urgent lesson for today: What is the role of truth in media? Can you trust the news that you're hearing and seeing? If not, how do you equip yourself? When Truth Mattered shows how journalism was done right ... and how those standards must still be applied today.
354 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2020
15 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Robert Giles
1 book2 followersRobert Giles made the connection between journalism and truth at a young age. The lessons came from a stern and resolute boss who would accept nothing less than accurate, fact-based stories. Seeking the truth became a guiding value in Bob’s journalism life of more than 50 years.
He is now retired and, with his wife, Nancy, lives in Traverse City, Michigan. At a time when life was slowing, a long-felt urge became a passion for telling the story that mattered most in his newspaper life. He wanted the world to know of the Akron Beacon Journal’s truthful narrative in reporting the campus shootings at Kent State, May 4, 1970. Before it was too late.
After service in the U.S. Army, his first reporting job, in 1958, was at the Beacon Journal. In 1965, he won a Nieman Fellowship and then accepted his editor’s challenge of learning to be an editor. By May 1970, he had become the paper’s managing editor.
After 17 years in Akron, Giles tried teaching journalism, briefly, at the University of Kansas. He loved the Jayhawks and the experience of opening young minds to the rigors of journalism. But he was a practitioner at heart and wanted to get back to a newsroom.
From 1977-1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor at the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union, in Rochester, N.Y. While in Rochester, he wrote a text book called Newsroom Management.
His final newspaper job was as editor and publisher of The Detroit News. He retired in 1997, but he wasn’t finished. An opportunity with the Freedom Forum and its Media Studies Center in New York City enabled Giles to direct an extensive examination of fairness in the news media.
Giles retired from the Freedom Forum in 2000 and, at age 67, moved on to the grandest job of all, as curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. During the final 11 years of his working life, he savored the privilege of selecting bright, courageous, working journalists for a transformative year of learning and expanding horizons.
Giles was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and of the Associated Press Managing Editors, and past president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism.
Giles grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a 1955 graduate of DePauw University. He received his master’s degree in 1956 from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He received the honorary Doctorate in Journalism from DePauw in 1996.
His wife, Nancy, is a psychologist and a specialist in trauma. They have three children: David is vice president and deputy general counsel for E.W. Scripps Co. He and his wife, Ellen, live in Cincinnati. Rob lives in Springfield, Va., with his wife, Kelly, and two daughters. He is a prosecutor in the U.S. Navy Trial Counsel Assistance Program. Megan, an artist and former journalIst, lives in Darien, Conn., with her husband, Jay, and their two children.
He is now retired and, with his wife, Nancy, lives in Traverse City, Michigan. At a time when life was slowing, a long-felt urge became a passion for telling the story that mattered most in his newspaper life. He wanted the world to know of the Akron Beacon Journal’s truthful narrative in reporting the campus shootings at Kent State, May 4, 1970. Before it was too late.
After service in the U.S. Army, his first reporting job, in 1958, was at the Beacon Journal. In 1965, he won a Nieman Fellowship and then accepted his editor’s challenge of learning to be an editor. By May 1970, he had become the paper’s managing editor.
After 17 years in Akron, Giles tried teaching journalism, briefly, at the University of Kansas. He loved the Jayhawks and the experience of opening young minds to the rigors of journalism. But he was a practitioner at heart and wanted to get back to a newsroom.
From 1977-1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor at the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union, in Rochester, N.Y. While in Rochester, he wrote a text book called Newsroom Management.
His final newspaper job was as editor and publisher of The Detroit News. He retired in 1997, but he wasn’t finished. An opportunity with the Freedom Forum and its Media Studies Center in New York City enabled Giles to direct an extensive examination of fairness in the news media.
Giles retired from the Freedom Forum in 2000 and, at age 67, moved on to the grandest job of all, as curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. During the final 11 years of his working life, he savored the privilege of selecting bright, courageous, working journalists for a transformative year of learning and expanding horizons.
Giles was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and of the Associated Press Managing Editors, and past president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism.
Giles grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a 1955 graduate of DePauw University. He received his master’s degree in 1956 from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He received the honorary Doctorate in Journalism from DePauw in 1996.
His wife, Nancy, is a psychologist and a specialist in trauma. They have three children: David is vice president and deputy general counsel for E.W. Scripps Co. He and his wife, Ellen, live in Cincinnati. Rob lives in Springfield, Va., with his wife, Kelly, and two daughters. He is a prosecutor in the U.S. Navy Trial Counsel Assistance Program. Megan, an artist and former journalIst, lives in Darien, Conn., with her husband, Jay, and their two children.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 20, 2021
I put off reading this book for way too long. I say that because I don't want anyone else to delay reading it, ever! This book was absolutely outstanding. Giles managed to balance the extraordinary detailed and complex story of the Kent State shootings along with the struggle of covering this event journalistically. (Is that a word? Go with it.) It was fascinating throughout, the writing was exceptionally readable and enjoyable, and I cannot recommend the book highly enough.
June 10, 2020
One Violent Day in May Defined the Era of Protests Against the Vietnam War. A Fine New Book Shows How Kent State Was Covered by a Brave and Determined Newspaper, With Lessons for Journalism Today
The words “Kent State” mean only one thing to many Americans who were adults during the Vietnam War: the place where National Guard soldiers opened fire and killed four student protesters.
The killing of the four students and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970 at a rural Ohio campus occurred amid anti-war protests around the country. It was a time when young people were angry with their parents, the government, the universities, and the news media. Older people were baffled and outraged by the protests, which seemed un-American, the work of “outside agitators,” or the folly of an indulged and spoiled generation.
The divide was not just young versus old, but also liberals versus conservatives, hippies versus squares, business versus labor, men versus women, and blacks versus whites.
An important difference from today was that the news media appeared - to people on the outside - to be free of those social conflicts. What we now call the “mainstream media” was the only news media. There was no internet, Twitter, Facebook, or 24-hour cable news channels catering to the left or right. The national news media organizations were less dominant, and most people got their news from very competitive local television stations and especially local newspapers.
Society’s tensions existed inside those newsrooms, of course, which mostly were run by older white men who had lived through the depression and World War II. They were defenders of the establishment, but they believed they had a vital mission to inform the country accurately and fairly, even when bad things happened.
The Akron Beacon Journal was the local newspaper 20 minutes from Kent State University, and the sometimes violent protests on campus - called rioting by the headline writers - were covered regularly. The weekend before the shooting, students had burned down the campus ROTC building and fought with firefighters trying to put out the blaze. The paper that landed on doorsteps that Sunday was a fat 271 pages, with 28 pages of classified ads, and a circulation of 174,000.
The young man in charge of the newsroom was the managing editor, Robert Giles. His boss was traveling overseas, and Giles was left in control. He would lead the paper’s coverage of the shootings, the long investigations that followed, and the court cases that lasted for years.
The paper’s coverage won a Pulitzer Prize and is a model of how to cover breaking news and the difficult search for truth, meaning, and justice.
The insightful and very readable story of how the paper covered Kent State is told in a new book by Giles called When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later. The book is focused on that one day in May, but really it is the product of the author’s lifelong career as a distinguished journalist and an example of how a single story can illustrate the core values of real news.
The book’s focus is on the reporters, photographers, and editors at the paper. Although the author was at the center of the coverage, he keeps himself in the background, writing the book the way he directed the coverage that day: firmly and competently in control, but without calling attention to himself. The few times Giles reveals his feelings are to take the blame for some mistake or to regret that reporters didn’t get the credit they deserved.
The paper’s work was not necessarily appreciated at the time by its readers. The editors received hundreds of letters, most of them angry and accusing the paper of taking sides in favor of the students and against the National Guard and the governor.
“There were two prominent and distinct views,” Giles writes. “Our commitment to be fair and balanced, and to give voice to the truth, came face to face with special interests: President Nixon, the governor of Ohio, university officials, National Guard officers, student radicals and angry townsfolk.”
The book concludes by imagining how a story like this would be covered today, at a time when print newspapers are in decline and the internet allows anyone to capture and share information.
Today the Akron paper, like most local papers, has a small fraction of the staff it had in 1970, and it no longer has a virtual monopoly on news coverage (or advertising) in the area. That solid, reliable institutional voice is missed.
On the other hand, many people witnessing a violent clash today would record the protest on their phones, possibly avoiding some of the confusion and uncertainty - even 50 years later - about what happened at Kent State, such as who started shooting and why.
Today “experts” would appear on cable news within minutes claiming that the shooting was the fault of Democrats or Republicans, or that the supposed video was enhanced or fake or out of context. People on social media would make up details about the shooting, and share speculation and conspiracy theories. Readers might throw up their hands and say it’s all too confusing, and anyway you can’t really know the truth.
When Truth Mattered is a powerful argument for trying to get the facts right, even when there is chaos, violence, and confusion, and even when people dispute the facts and disagree about their significance.
The paper didn’t get everything right the first time, and editors kept sending the reporters out to correct the record or explore new angles. The book shows how quality journalism was done 50 years ago, and holds up a high but achievable standard for how it should be done today.
(Peter Copeland, a former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief, is the author of Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter)
The words “Kent State” mean only one thing to many Americans who were adults during the Vietnam War: the place where National Guard soldiers opened fire and killed four student protesters.
The killing of the four students and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970 at a rural Ohio campus occurred amid anti-war protests around the country. It was a time when young people were angry with their parents, the government, the universities, and the news media. Older people were baffled and outraged by the protests, which seemed un-American, the work of “outside agitators,” or the folly of an indulged and spoiled generation.
The divide was not just young versus old, but also liberals versus conservatives, hippies versus squares, business versus labor, men versus women, and blacks versus whites.
An important difference from today was that the news media appeared - to people on the outside - to be free of those social conflicts. What we now call the “mainstream media” was the only news media. There was no internet, Twitter, Facebook, or 24-hour cable news channels catering to the left or right. The national news media organizations were less dominant, and most people got their news from very competitive local television stations and especially local newspapers.
Society’s tensions existed inside those newsrooms, of course, which mostly were run by older white men who had lived through the depression and World War II. They were defenders of the establishment, but they believed they had a vital mission to inform the country accurately and fairly, even when bad things happened.
The Akron Beacon Journal was the local newspaper 20 minutes from Kent State University, and the sometimes violent protests on campus - called rioting by the headline writers - were covered regularly. The weekend before the shooting, students had burned down the campus ROTC building and fought with firefighters trying to put out the blaze. The paper that landed on doorsteps that Sunday was a fat 271 pages, with 28 pages of classified ads, and a circulation of 174,000.
The young man in charge of the newsroom was the managing editor, Robert Giles. His boss was traveling overseas, and Giles was left in control. He would lead the paper’s coverage of the shootings, the long investigations that followed, and the court cases that lasted for years.
The paper’s coverage won a Pulitzer Prize and is a model of how to cover breaking news and the difficult search for truth, meaning, and justice.
The insightful and very readable story of how the paper covered Kent State is told in a new book by Giles called When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later. The book is focused on that one day in May, but really it is the product of the author’s lifelong career as a distinguished journalist and an example of how a single story can illustrate the core values of real news.
The book’s focus is on the reporters, photographers, and editors at the paper. Although the author was at the center of the coverage, he keeps himself in the background, writing the book the way he directed the coverage that day: firmly and competently in control, but without calling attention to himself. The few times Giles reveals his feelings are to take the blame for some mistake or to regret that reporters didn’t get the credit they deserved.
The paper’s work was not necessarily appreciated at the time by its readers. The editors received hundreds of letters, most of them angry and accusing the paper of taking sides in favor of the students and against the National Guard and the governor.
“There were two prominent and distinct views,” Giles writes. “Our commitment to be fair and balanced, and to give voice to the truth, came face to face with special interests: President Nixon, the governor of Ohio, university officials, National Guard officers, student radicals and angry townsfolk.”
The book concludes by imagining how a story like this would be covered today, at a time when print newspapers are in decline and the internet allows anyone to capture and share information.
Today the Akron paper, like most local papers, has a small fraction of the staff it had in 1970, and it no longer has a virtual monopoly on news coverage (or advertising) in the area. That solid, reliable institutional voice is missed.
On the other hand, many people witnessing a violent clash today would record the protest on their phones, possibly avoiding some of the confusion and uncertainty - even 50 years later - about what happened at Kent State, such as who started shooting and why.
Today “experts” would appear on cable news within minutes claiming that the shooting was the fault of Democrats or Republicans, or that the supposed video was enhanced or fake or out of context. People on social media would make up details about the shooting, and share speculation and conspiracy theories. Readers might throw up their hands and say it’s all too confusing, and anyway you can’t really know the truth.
When Truth Mattered is a powerful argument for trying to get the facts right, even when there is chaos, violence, and confusion, and even when people dispute the facts and disagree about their significance.
The paper didn’t get everything right the first time, and editors kept sending the reporters out to correct the record or explore new angles. The book shows how quality journalism was done 50 years ago, and holds up a high but achievable standard for how it should be done today.
(Peter Copeland, a former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief, is the author of Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter)
February 8, 2022
An excellent book about the shootings at Kent State and local journalism, the way it used to be practiced -- the way I was able to practice it for almost four decades. In a sense this is a double cautionary tale, about government without accountability and the dumbing-down of a once-noble calling. Kent State was a watershed moment during a tumultuous time when newspapers could help right wrongs, end a war and force a president from office -- by pursuing and reporting the truth.
There's a lot of redundancy here, though, most of it due to the book's structure.
Introducing the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom (four pages!) at the end of the May 2: An Active Campus chapter feels premature. There are biographies of key staffers at the end of the book, a better place for them.
A two-page coda to the May 4: Noon chapter titled "61 Bullets" feels like a mix of fact and unattributed opinion. (Also, one of the weapons mentioned is a shotgun, which doesn't fire bullets.)
Later, I wondered whether autopsies were performed and whether there was ballistic evidence. There are nine pages devoted to a bullet hole in a metal sculpture and a test by the Akron Beacon Journal that re-created the shot, to dispatch rumors of a sniper on campus. Given that the book was published 50 years after events, a mention of the state of police science in 1970 might be appropriate.
Nine pages of samples of letters to the editor reacting to the newspaper's reporting were fairly predictable and better suited for an online archive, maybe along with the newspaper's editorials during that period.
And, I think there's gloss added, one example being author Robert Giles' assertion that he had bigger, deeper questions in mind before the tear gas had cleared. (At the same time he admits there was no time to be reflective.) I'm sure there was time eventually to consider the big questions, but journalism in those dicey moments tends to be reactive: dispatching personnel, manning phones, cobbling together facts and ripping apart a plan and creating a new one on the fly.
I found myself going backward and forward from text to images to match them up. A list of photos and illustrations would have helped.
I'm quibbling, though. I'd like to see copies of this book in time capsules and universities and newsrooms to remind news practitioners and consumers how to do the job responsibly and well.
There's a lot of redundancy here, though, most of it due to the book's structure.
Introducing the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom (four pages!) at the end of the May 2: An Active Campus chapter feels premature. There are biographies of key staffers at the end of the book, a better place for them.
A two-page coda to the May 4: Noon chapter titled "61 Bullets" feels like a mix of fact and unattributed opinion. (Also, one of the weapons mentioned is a shotgun, which doesn't fire bullets.)
Later, I wondered whether autopsies were performed and whether there was ballistic evidence. There are nine pages devoted to a bullet hole in a metal sculpture and a test by the Akron Beacon Journal that re-created the shot, to dispatch rumors of a sniper on campus. Given that the book was published 50 years after events, a mention of the state of police science in 1970 might be appropriate.
Nine pages of samples of letters to the editor reacting to the newspaper's reporting were fairly predictable and better suited for an online archive, maybe along with the newspaper's editorials during that period.
And, I think there's gloss added, one example being author Robert Giles' assertion that he had bigger, deeper questions in mind before the tear gas had cleared. (At the same time he admits there was no time to be reflective.) I'm sure there was time eventually to consider the big questions, but journalism in those dicey moments tends to be reactive: dispatching personnel, manning phones, cobbling together facts and ripping apart a plan and creating a new one on the fly.
I found myself going backward and forward from text to images to match them up. A list of photos and illustrations would have helped.
I'm quibbling, though. I'd like to see copies of this book in time capsules and universities and newsrooms to remind news practitioners and consumers how to do the job responsibly and well.
June 26, 2020
The atrocity at Kent State’s in 1970 is a lasting personal memory from my freshman college year. Giles was acting manager of the local newspaper the Beacon Journal. His book includes generous acknowledgements of all the paper’s writers, editors and the paper’s Kent State journalism students and graduates who investigated and reported the KS atrocity. The paper’s management staff and Knight Newspapers directed reporters to substantiate all evidence related to the events prior to and after the KS murders for their reporting. The Beacon Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for their factual reporting.
Giles ends the book 50 years after KS with his thoughts about news reporting today and compares it to the reporting of 1970’s KS atrocity. His comments show his disappointment in the decline of news today that is often based on personal interpretations and disinformation spread by social media rather than the fact-based newspaper reporting of 50 years ago.
Giles ends the book 50 years after KS with his thoughts about news reporting today and compares it to the reporting of 1970’s KS atrocity. His comments show his disappointment in the decline of news today that is often based on personal interpretations and disinformation spread by social media rather than the fact-based newspaper reporting of 50 years ago.
June 28, 2022
This book gives a comprehensive examination of the Kent State shootings and the media coverage of the tragedy from the perspective of someone who lived it. Robert Giles was an editor of the Akron Beacon Journal on May 4, 1970, while the horror unfolded. This book not only looks at the newspaper's award-winning quest to uncover the truth of what happens, but questions how the same event would unfold in today's highly-polarized climate.
August 9, 2020
A highly compelling read by Bob Giles about May 4, 1970 - the tragic date of the Kent State shootings, when four students were killed and nine were wounded. This book brings you on campus for the protests - and into the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom for the reporting. The Beacon Journal’s journalists were ultimately awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a story that is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.
July 6, 2023
Informative, and dispelled many myths I believed about the "Kent State Shootings." Not necessarily a book I would have selected, but glad it was selected for me. I especially appreciated the analysis of how the events might have unfolded IF it had happened today. Nicely done.
September 6, 2023
I learned a great deal about the Kent State murders and 1970 journalism. However, my reading included a fight to stay awake. Perhaps part of that is due to me actually reading rather than listening as I usually do. This book didn't have an audio version.
April 27, 2025
Excellent story about dedicated journalists searching for the truth of the Kent State shootings. The author was managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal at the time (1970). He ends the book with advice on how to be news consumers in these days of instant and overwhelming information.
October 7, 2020
A good read that shows great journalism!!
March 2, 2021
The analysis at the end is outstanding, and includes comparisons to current news reporting and social media influences.
March 19, 2021
This is as much a story about local journalism (Akron Beacon Journal) as it is about the Kent State shootings in 1970. Good read.
October 21, 2023
This is a great history of the May 4, 1970, assault at Kent State by members of the National Guard told by someone trained in the skill of being objective.
April 27, 2025
Historically a very interesting book and insight into those that were there. The end dragged on a bit in regards to awards and work done to get awards.
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December 2, 2025a look at the shootings at Kent State in 1970, from the eyes of a journalist who worked for a local newspaper
December 8, 2022
This is an important addition and voice to the events on May 4, 1970 on the campus of Kent State University. Giles writes with clarity and takes the reader through the journalistic decisions made at the Akron Beacon Journal (for which the paper received a Pulitzer Prize). Giles also frames what this incident might look like in the 21st century with the landscape of journalism completely changed. This book made me long for the heyday of journalism, when dedicated reporters went about their jobs seeking to convey the truth to their audience and papers invested in investigative reporting.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews