Truth and Lies
October 13, 1992, was the day I gave up on mainstream journalism. It was the day I realized that such “journalism,” as it is now practiced, is surreal, irrelevant, unconcerned with facts or reality.
That was the day when I first recognized the appalling nonsense of “he said/she said” journalism. Others have described and lamented this phenomenon at great length, and with more clarity and insight than I can muster here. But since your first time is always special, let me tell you about my terrible epiphany of October 13, 1992.
I was watching the vice-presidential debate, which featured the incumbent, Dan Quayle, and the two challengers, Sen. Al Gore and retired Vice Admiral James Stockdale.
A key exchange in the debate involved Quayle’s misrepresentation of a passage from Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance. In the chapter in question, Gore argued for a new “Marshall Plan” to promote sustainable development in the Third World. Quayle offered a garbled interpretation of this idea and Gore corrected him.
The point here is that the debate got very specific — with Quayle citing a specific page number, page 304, of Gore’s book.
After the debate, I clicked between the networks and watched the talking heads discuss their feelings about which of the candidates was more “convincing” in this dispute. Nobody bothered to pick up a copy of the damned book, turn to page 304, and compare what the candidates said with the rather specific and easily checked facts of the matter.
The book was a best-seller. It shouldn’t have been hard to find a copy. Once Quayle cited a specific page number, I got up, walked across the living room, grabbed a copy of the book and looked up the passage. My apartment was apparently better equipped than the research departments of ABC, NBC and CBS news.
Yet none of the “journalists” apparently considered this their job. It did not even occur to them to look up the disputed passage.
Let’s face it: whatever happens in Thursday’s debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.
But what will the print media do? Let’s hope they don’t do what they did four years ago.
Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000 debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. After all, during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after another - about his budget plans, about his prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking in the next day’s papers should have been devastating.
But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their “body language.” After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore’s sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush’s lies. And even the fact-checking pieces “buried inside the newspaper” were, as Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, “constrained by an effort to balance one candidate’s big mistakes” - that is, Mr. Bush’s lies - “against the other’s minor errors.”
The result of this emphasis on the candidates’ acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Mr. Bush’s defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.
All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.
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