The never-ending saga of the
American political campaign for the presidential nomination has revealed (or
newly emphasized) some amazing fractures where truth is concerned. Each week,
it seems, one of the Republican aspirants for the crown issues a new “whopper”
that the major media organizations still seem loathe to call a “lie.” Leading
the pack, of course, is Donald Trump, the man who seems to have no moral sense
whatever. His latest whopper involves his claim that he personally “saw”
thousands of Arabs cheering in Jersey City as they watched the twin towers fall
on 9/11. Even faced with evidence that his claim is impossible—by both
reporters and rivals like New Jersey governor Chris Christie—Trump has stuck to
his story, this past week only modifying it some by saying that what he saw was
on television, and then that millions of people around the globe are convinced
that they saw it too. And yet, no one calls him a “liar,” which is what he so
clearly is. Rather, the shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh back him up, saying his
essential facts are “what everyone in the world knows.” Ben Carson, also vying
for the nomination (though no one can really say why; Carson himself seems to
think God has chosen him for the role), has also been caught in several
‘whoppers,’ especially regarding his youth. He claimed that, when young, he was
a ‘bad boy’ who had stabbed someone, until this proved slightly exaggerated; he
also claimed that he had been offered a scholarship to West Point, though everyone
else knows that those who are admitted attend the military academy for free.
Like Trump, though, Carson has refused to recant, and simply offers slightly
amended versions of his whoppers. And Carly Fiorina, the one-time CEO of
Hewlett-Packard (which nearly expired under her tenure), has famously insisted
that she “saw” videos of feminists harvesting fetal brains, though no such
videos have ever been located. She also continues to claim that 92% of the jobs
lost under President Obama were lost by women—though the same statistic was
once used by the Romney campaign until it was seen to be so obviously false the
campaign abandoned it. And others in the Republican camp keep doing the same
thing: uttering false statistics and faux facts that they refuse to recant. The
reasons seems clear: none of the candidates seems to suffer in the polls
because of such lies. Their supporters only double down, like the candidates,
in their support and, also like them, attribute the criticism of their darlings
to “liberal-left media bias.”
What
has happened? Do Americans care anymore about holding the aspirants to public
office to something as arcane as truth? Do most contemporary Americans even
have the capability to distinguish truth from lies? Or do most people now prefer
what Stephen Colbert hilariously called “truthiness”—the feel in our gut that
we are right, without the need for all that tedious evidence, and logic, and fact.
These
and other questions are very much at issue in Charles Lewis’ recent book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the
Decline of America’s Moral Integrity (Public Affairs: 2014). Lewis has been
a journalist all his adult life, serving as an investigator/producer for Mike
Wallace on 60 Minutes, and then
founding several nonprofit organizations devoted to bolstering the battered
profession of investigative journalism, most notably in 1989 when he founded The Center for Public Integrity. What he
does in 935 Lies is to show—using
some of the familiar cases of the last half-century marked by both government
and corporate malfeasance (the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, based on a presidential
lie; the Watergate scandal, based on countless presidential lies; the rush to
war in Iraq, based on no less than 935 lies by Bush Administration officials
claiming Saddam’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction as their casus belli; and the notorious history
of tobacco industry denial and obfuscation of the clear link between tobacco
smoke and lung cancer)—how both government and corporate lying has become more
blatant and ubiquitous over the years. Indeed, Lewis himself had produced the 60 Minutes show on tobacco industry
lying called “Tobacco on Trial,” in the course of which he was heavily
pressured to kill or at least modify the story by the CEO of CBS, Laurence Tisch.
Lewis prevailed in that battle, though a friend of his from ABC, the
Emmy-award-winning Marty Koughan, was forced in 1994 to stop his investigation
of the tobacco industry on the show Turning
Point. Philip Morris had filed a $10 billion libel suit against ABC, and
the network executives decided not only to kill the story, but, as part of a
settlement, to publicly apologize to
Philip Morris for its reporters’ attempt to tell the truth. That truth, as
cited by Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop, is that due to the lies of the
tobacco industry over the years, “100 million people around the world died from
smoking-related illnesses in the 20th Century, according to the World
Health Organization,” and that an additional one billion would die in this century. To sum it up, Lewis cites
what Marty Koughan told the Washington Post in August 1995: With its lawsuit,
Philip Morris had shown that “for a paltry $10 million or $20 million in legal
fees…you can effectively silence the criticism” (139).
This
is really the key for Charles Lewis. The problem had morphed from the hiding or
censorship of important information by the government, as in the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution (N. Vietnamese boats had not
attacked American warships), or corporations as in the tobacco wars, to self-censorship by the major news media.
Lewis saw this firsthand in his attempt to produce a 60 Minutes segment called Foreign
Agent, in which he was exposing how former US officials cashed in on their
political connections by working as lobbyists on behalf of foreign governments.
He had focused on Pete Peterson, a former Commerce Secretary who had become CEO
of the investment firm Blackstone, whose consultants were shown in the story to
exemplify precisely the government-to-industry pipeline the story was featuring.
But Peterson was a close friend of 60
Minutes’ creator, Don Hewitt, who told Lewis to ‘edit’ the story. Lewis finally
agreed to the edit by substituting former Reagan budget director David Stockman
(also with Blackstone) for Peterson. Though that didn’t solve all the problems or
the blame laid on Lewis, even by Mike Wallace, the story aired as edited in the
end. But Lewis knew he had had enough:
“I
had had a jarring epiphany that the obstacles on the way to publishing the
unvarnished truth had become more formidable internally than externally” (197).
In short, even before government or
corporate pressures, the media were censoring themselves to avoid trouble and
maintain cozy relationships with power. And the real conundrum of television news,
according to Lewis, had become (or perhaps always was) the basic conflict
between money and truth: “TV is an immensely powerful medium, but its potential
to make astonishing sums of money is typically realized only by appealing to
the lowest-common-denominator instincts of viewers.” The most famous instance of
this was when legendary CBS producer Fred Friendly tried to broadcast live
coverage of Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1971 Senate Foreign Relations
Committee hearings about the problems in Vietnam. To do so, however, CBS would
have to interrupt its profitable daytime reruns of I Love Lucy. Not surprisingly, CBS execs chose I Love Lucy. To have aired the Fulbright hearings over Lucy would
have represented, as David Halberstam put it, “a higher price for democracy
than most network executives would be willing to pay” (164).
After
quitting CBS in 1989, Charles Lewis founded The
Center for Public Integrity, today the largest nonprofit investigative
reporting organization in the world. It has not only received Pulitzer prizes,
Polk awards, and countless other honors for its serious investigative
reporting, but has also inspired other similar organizations to supplant the
seriously curtailed reporting traditionally done by large newspapers—who can no
longer afford it. Lewis is rather optimistic about these developments,
including those on the Internet, and about the continuing ‘thirst’ for the
general public to know the truth.
I
am not so sure. Consider what we began with: the serious decline in any price
being paid by presidential aspirants who are caught in outrageous lies. The
public simply does not seem to care if their public figures shade or distort or
completely falsify the truth. This is partly because of the decline in
investigative reporting that Lewis details in his book. It is also due to secrecy—the
mania for classifying documents that Lewis also records: just recently, for
example, the number of US Government documents classified has risen from 8.6
million in 2001 to 23.8 million in 2008, and then in two more years, to 76.7 million documents classified in 2010.
All of these documents require security clearance of one degree or another,
with 1.2 million Americans now having Top Secret clearance to read them. As
Lewis puts it, “our citizenry is divided into two tiers—a small elite with
access to inside knowledge about our government, and a vast lower echelon that
is kept in the dark” (227-8). But what Lewis cited about the dumbing down of
the media is also clearly a factor. Here, a recent article by Matt Taibbi has
some very salient points to make.
Taibbi’s
article (in Rolling Stone, reprinted
27 November on Reader Supported News),
responding to the same lies by Republican candidates cited above, is titled:
“America is Too Dumb for TV News.” Like many of us, Taibbi is shocked by the
apparent indifference of the public to the level of lying, and more, to the
lack of any penalty paid by the liars when their lies are publicly exposed. As
he puts it, it used to be that “if a candidate said something nuts…the
candidate ultimately was either vindicated, apologized, or suffered terrible
agonies.” As, for example, Al Gore did when confronted with his implication
that he had invented the Internet. Now, however, politicians “are learning that
they can say just about anything and get away with it.” They just blame the
media and get to be heroes to their media-hating base, which is convinced that
the liberal media is all “controlled by special interests” who want an
established candidate as their nominee.
But
Taibbi goes deeper, into what major media in this nation have become—“a
consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers
or video games.” Where once TV news was dominated by Edward R. Murrow and real
investigative reports on important issues of the day, now it’s nothing but
“murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in
ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.” The results are clear: When you make the news
into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon “audiences lose the ability to
distinguish between what they think they’re doing, informing themselves, and
what they’re actually doing, shopping.” So it’s not just that at some point, TV
executives decided that their audiences preferred I Love Lucy (and the money they coughed up for goods promoted
there) to Fulbright Senate Committee Hearings on dull old Vietnam; it’s also
that after many years of this, audiences simply no longer have the ability to
distinguish between corporate-generated pseudo-news and real information
necessary to a democracy. Between the truth as supported by facts, and the lies
that stroke their preferences about the way things in the world are, or should
be. Most people must know, by now, that what they’re seeing on TV commercials
are lies—distortions of the truth, if not outright fabrications. The problem
is, the commercial lies begin to bleed over into the news distortions. The news
omissions. The news that becomes simply a slight makeover of whatever foreign
or domestic position the opinion-makers hand out for us to believe.
And
perhaps it’s even more basic than that. It really becomes a question of how
much truth we wish to know, or can bear to know. How much do we wish to know
about the dire predictions regarding climate change? Regarding the complex mess
in Syria deriving from our own foreign misadventures? Regarding the critical
state of our oceans, or our garbage dumps, or what we’re doing to our own
bodies, our own planet? About how we’re being manipulated daily by the most
corrupt, murderous, money-hungry corporations on this planet, who have
literally become governments unto themselves. About how the endless dramas on
TV about cops and their glorious efforts to protect us are really meant to
disguise how corrupt they truly are, how specifically designed to protect only
certain segments of the population while controlling the ‘other’ segments, even
unto their deaths? How much of this do we really want to know? Or would we
rather tune in to I Love Lucy?
In
short, though we are surely the target of massive deception from above, we also
collude in our own self-deception; the self-censorship we confront stems, at
least in part, from our own willingness to leave the hard decisions to others.
Trained by media to be spectators at the pro game rather than players in our
own, to be watchers rather than actors or singers or protestors, we grow more
and more content to let the world proceed along lines of least resistance and
enjoy our mediated world, our pre-fabricated confinement, our gut-satisfying
“truthiness” as Stephen Colbert would have it. That’s because knowing is hard,
knowing takes effort, being aware of what is being done to us, and what we’re
doing to ourselves forces us to have to think and consider changes. And change
is hard. Sadly, the changes have been proceeding at an alarming pace beneath
our level of awareness, and have gone very far indeed. Whether we, most of us,
can ever get back to that thirst for real truth that Charles Lewis is still
convinced has never left us, remains to be seen. But it surely appears, in this
terrible season of idiot politics and faith-based slaughter, that the prospects
are not very good.
Lawrence DiStasi
Great readding your blog
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