Lately, I’ve been having this strange feeling about how
things are going in our world. It seems to me that the world is chock full of
liars, pedants, and people who think that bending the truth is not the same as
lying outright. The stank is somewhat akin to the comment Big Daddy makes to
his son Brick in the Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you
notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't
nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells
like death.
And so we have the summation of this presidential election
cycle. It’s hard enough to try to figure out who’s telling the truth and who is
not. Indeed both candidates have been guilty of stepping over the lines here
and there, and the media has not done a good job as the fourth estate. The fourth estate, journalists according to
Edmund Burke, has done as much to confuse the public as they have to support
their own political biases.
They seem to, at a whim, grab a comment and decide how they
want to interpret it, and then build momentum by dunning the public with
article after article supporting their interpretation of an event. Whatever
happened to putting out the facts and letting the public make its own
interpretation?
During my days working as a reporter in Chesterfield County,
I witnessed what I would call a bit of tampering. It was in the heyday of
Chesterfield’s dealing with the infamous shrink swell soil problems. The public
was justly upset with the county’s handling of the problem, as their houses
suffered from a multitude of issues ranging from cracked foundations to
chimneys pulling away from the sides of their homes.
In whole, it was a mess. The county appeared to be less than
up front in their dealings with the public. And the issue languished in the
newspapers for months, with a new angle or storyline nearly every week. One
citizen was behind most of the movement to get the county to help make things
right. But behind the scenes, a local reporter was coaching the citizen in what
to say and when to say it.
The stories made great reading for local news. The
reporter’s stories were submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, but did
not win. And I was left wondering about the ethics involved. Should the
reporter have inserted himself into the debate? If he was writing the stories,
at what point does his “help” fall into the category of conflict of interest?
Currently, we see the same kind of mess in the current
Presidential race. It seems that when either side makes a misstep or misquote,
the opposing media, not the same as the impartial media, takes one another to
task over the incident.
Take for instance Mitt Romney’s assertion that upon his
previous election President Barack Obama went on an apology tour throughout the
Mideast and Europe. Some members of the media have said that this is not true,
because Obama never said the word apology at any time in any of his speeches.
But his comments appear to have the ring of apology.
On the other hand, some members of the media want to say
that Obama’s comments about “acts of terror” following the Benghazi consulate
disaster indicates that the administration stated it was a terror attack from
the very beginning. But a closer reading of his speech doesn’t show that his
comments related in any way to the organized Al Qaeda assault on the consulate
and the murder of four Americans.
There is no question that both sides have dabbled in grey
areas regarding the truth. They are after all human beings. And, when studying
up for debates or speeches, I suppose it would be easy to tangle thoughts and
ideas.
I don’t blame the candidates for that.
But the media is another question. The media used to simply
present the facts. Now, it presents the facts so that the conclusions one draws
relate to how they want you to think. Most of that kind of writing used to be
the domain of the Op/Ed (opinion-editorial) pages, but today a bias can easily
be spotted in just about every story published and varies from paper to paper
depending on the opinion of the writer and journal.
Caveat lector!
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