Fifty years ago, the guns fired

... and truth changed a nation.

It’s just past noon at Kent State University in Ohio. An anti-Vietnam War rally is underway, part of the wave of demonstrations that have played out peacefully for months at the nation’s college campuses. But not so peaceful on this day … at this minute. Young National Guardsmen turn and fire a lethal barrage of more than 60 bullets at demonstrators, shattering the spring air. In just 13 seconds, four innocent students are killed. Nine are wounded. The deadly confrontation changes our country forever.

When Truth Mattered is the compelling story of how a local newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, reported on the shootings and the aftermath, creating a truthful narrative that has endured, unchanged and unchallenged, for 50 years.

Author Robert Giles, the managing editor who directed the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, gives an unforgettable, first- person account of what took place on the Kent State campus and in his newsroom during that fateful time. Just as important, Giles links the meaning of the Beacon Journal’s truth-telling at Kent State with important lessons for journalism today—a welcome antidote in this poisonous era of alleged “fake news.”