Truth
“There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it's ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job.” -- Wayne Barrett, in his farewell column, Village Voice
Wayne Barrett, who worked for more than 30 years at what was once a pretty good home for investigative journalism, was “let go” this month for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with his esteem for “the truth.” We don’t know, because we’re not being given “the truth” that lies behind his unceremonious jettisoning.
And that is telling.
Telling, not so much about his erstwhile employer, the Village Voice, or about Barrett or about another really good investigative reporter, Tom Robbins, who is also leaving the Voice, but about the claim Barrett makes in his aloha.
I’m going to take Barrett’s claim seriously, and not as a sentimental homage burbled forth as an attempt at menschkeit. Perhaps this is a mistake, but it’s one I’m in the mood to make.
To say that any given profession has a lock on “the truth” or that its practitioners are more likely to tell the truth than others, or that the truths they are allowed to discover, and perhaps publish, are whole and nothing-but-the, is silly on its face, and kind of annoying.
If WB means that journalists are expected and encouraged to “tell the truth” professionally – more than people in other lines of work, we’re entitled to ask what makes him think so. Certainly in some Platonic realm of Ideas, the press exists to give us unvarnished accounts of what’s really going on out there. But most of us have come to realize that this is not what happens in the real world. Even in the best of our news organizations, corporate pressures make it difficult, if not impossible, to tell the truth. In fact, if you subtract the vast, lukewarm middle of the media spectrum, which tells us only what the powers that be allow it to, news organizations have become unabashedly ideological, which some might say makes them actually the worst place to look for truth. Just consider Fox News and Democracy Now. Watch their respective coverage of any given event, and tell me how exactly journalists deserve the title “Keepers of the Truth.” (My point is not that Democracy Now is bad journalism but that it tells the story much differently than Fox does.)
This is not to say that there aren’t journalists who believe their job is to ferret out the truth and bring it to the attention of the public. Sometimes, if one stays in the profession for a while, it is necessary to build a fairly complex scaffolding of rationalization to support that belief. On rare occasions – it is usually on the very local level – a reporter can actually carve out a small living telling the rest of us “what happened.” But there’s no question that scribes can only tell us what they are allowed to tell us, and the freedom they have to write what they have witnessed and uncovered will nearly always stand in inverse proportion to the importance of their subject. Cover a community meeting in the Bronx or the birth of a baby walrus in the San Francisco Zoo, and you might have carte blanche, because what you say probably threatens no one and anyway, who will read it? Cover the war in Iraq ... well, you only have to watch one BBC report on that to see that what Americans are allowed to see and hear and know is extremely filtered. And who are all these mainstream American reporters who lie to us every single day? Are they the same ones who belong to the sacred order of those who are paid to tell the truth? Or are they some other people?
Perhaps WB means that journalists, more than people in most other lines of work, attempt to tell the truth. Leaving aside the complete failure of the American press to actually accomplish this, perhaps it is something that reporters try. That they come to work every day trying to find out what happened, and sometimes why. Never mind that, were they to uncover something really important, there would be powerful forces arrayed against it ever seeing the light of day. Not the least of which is the insidious parasite called “access.”
Access is a simple concept. It’s based on a simple fact: While some reporters are in fact true believers and are motivated largely by the desire to inform the public about what goes on in the world, many are driven by an intense hunger for winning – for scooping the competition, for winning the Pulitzer, for being a player. To accomplish these things, you must not, above all, piss off your sources. Because then, the well of special information you rely on will go dry, and you will have no way to win. You will, in fact, be a loser.
But to maintain access, and not piss off your sources, you have to make little bargains – I am allowed to say this, but I can’t say that. Your sources will be content, because nothing truly damaging will come out, and you will be content, because you have all this information that you can use to write stories, before your rivals do. And you are now part of a club, an exclusive club, which controls the flow of information to the people who are not in the club.
Not all reporters fall into this trap, and I think that WB and Tom Robbins were probably among those who weren’t completely corrupted by it, but most reporters – if they ever get to the point of doing serious news – do. And if that’s the case, where are we with “journalism is the only job where you get paid to tell the truth”? I have to say I’m not totally buying it.
So, while I am not tarring all news organizations and all individuals with this brush, I really have no doubt that the mainstream American press is pretty much bought and paid for. Most outlets are owned by large corporations concerned mainly with profits, which makes loud controversy a thing they prefer to avoid. Not that it hasn’t always been the case that someone owned newspapers and TV stations, but in our day that grip has become much tighter and more consolidated, and the old standards of journalistic integrity are honored more in the breach than the observance.
Which brings me to the nature of truth, which is of course the main subject of this screed. Let us concede for the sake of argument that reporters, at their best, tell us “what really happened.” They find an event, issue, trend, or act, and they strip away the confusion, complexity and lies that make it impervious to our understanding. In this ideal world, they perform an absolutely essential service: they help us interpret what is happening right now so that we can judge for ourselves its importance, and what, if anything, we ought to do about it, as citizens. Like the Homeric Muse, they connect us to a world beyond our immediate ken, and for those of us who have some knowledge of history, they give us the opportunity to see the connections between the past and our own moment in The Great Unfolding.
All this is accomplished by giving us an account, a story that corresponds in some way to the events as they really happened. When we say, with WB, that reporters are more dedicated to telling the truth than any other professional people, we mean that they are supposed to give true, unbiased accounts of what happened. That the story they tell is not a lie, but the truth.
And yet, truth is more, much more, than mere accuracy.
And this is why Wayne Barrett’s smug, self-righteous sentences annoy me. Because, in a sense, no institution has damaged truth as much as the news media.
Why is it wrong to lie? Why does the Ninth Commandment read “Thou shalt not bear false witness...”? If this is an ethical injunction, what is its purpose? What do we lose when we lie, and what do we gain when we don’t?
This, of course, is a very big question, and much ink has been spilled on the subject. But here is what I think.
Truth is not primarily something that inheres in a statement. All news reporting is substantially a statement, which can be accurate or inaccurate. But truth ... is something more, something which affects us much more deeply than accuracy per se. It may have its roots in accuracy, but its branches spread wider.
On a strictly secular level, truth is essential to living in a society. Because we are creatures made largely of words. The world is what is because of the way we have conceptually organized it. It might be a planet without human concepts to give it shape, but it only becomes a world when we conceive it. Concepts are only possible through language – we can only think what we can say. That is why we have paradoxes. A paradox is not a true contradiction. A paradox is a truth we don’t yet have the conceptual language to recognize as non-contradictory. Geniuses can sometimes transcend the conceptual repertoire of their time and place and resolve a paradox, sometimes through the use of mathematics (itself an alternative language), sometimes simply by intuiting the limitations of a particular word/concept and positing a new one that dissolves what had seemed adamantine contradiction.
Who we are is intimately related to what we can think and imagine, which is to say what we can say. And when we come together with other people, language is the chief avenue to trust. “Walking the walk” would have no meaning if someone hadn’t first “talked the talk.” We privilege the former because it seems realer, but “real” in this case is a matter of the absence of hypocrisy, which requires language.
The loss of trust in a relationship is a terrible thing. It happens when one no longer feels, or can no longer delude oneself, that there is a simple connection between what is said and what is done. The words themselves have lost their power to act as a meeting place of souls. Words salve the fundamental loneliness of the human condition, in a way that physical union cannot. Erotic intimacy, or even an affectionate touch, is its own kind of union, but language creates a bubble in which two people have access to each other through mutually understood signs.
If one person in a relationship, say, has an affair, and lies about it, the seeds are sown for the erosion of the feeling that words have meaning. That’s partly why people often sense unfaithfulness before it is revealed. Once that trust, which is oddly enough a function of language, is hobbled, then the whole edifice, or artifice, of relationship starts to crumble. We second-guess every utterance. We depend for our mental health on honesty, integrity, and keeping promises far more than we know. Much of the malaise that besets the world is the result of a loss of faith – not in a deity so much as in the power of words to convey something real, something that can be relied on.
It’s surely true that there never was a time or place when anyone was completely honest. And the notion of trust lost in a relationship is something of an artificial construct, because the beginnings of love always involve much lovely deception. Still, in the season of fantasy, fabrications are part of the dance, while actually getting to know someone is a call to know oneself – and that goes nowhere when you’re lying to yourself as a matter of course.
I have been around for a bit more than half a century now, and even allowing for the self-serving distortions of memory, I have noticed a genuine increase in the occurrence of casual lying and a corresponding decrease in the respect for integrity (wholeness). It’s kind of astounding how often it happens. Someone with whom you had plans calls at the last minute and cancels because “something came up.” Or someone makes a date for a certain time, shows up 45 minutes later and thinks that’s okay. Or someone doesn’t come to work because they have a “stomach flu,” which is the most convenient ailment to make up because it can clear up in a day and doesn’t have any outward symptoms. People will tell bald-faced lies right to your face and actually think you can’t tell. Email has made lies easier. And I think the whole cyber-reality thing has made actual reality less ... tangible somehow. As though what we say and do doesn’t really matter.
Which brings me to my point about news and reporting and truth and the fatuous things WB said about them.
I watched a really good documentary a few weeks ago – “The Weather Underground.” It tells the story of the Weathermen from the group’s inception as a militant offshoot of SDS to its eventual demise in the 70s. The Weathermen were responsible for a lot of destruction and a few deaths, most notably their own, in a West Village apartment in 1970 – which I remember quite well. I was 14 and took off from high school to gape at the smoking building. Really, it was only good luck (if you can call it that) that saved the Weather Underground from becoming mass murderers. They had committed themselves to killing but killed far fewer than they might have. And yet, there was something one of them – Brian Flanagan – said in the film that struck me: He said (and I paraphrase), The Vietnam War made us all crazy. When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.
We like good guys to wear white hats and bad guys black hats. It’s easy to condemn the Weathermen, and I do. Most of them condemn themselves now. They were 18, 20, 21 then – the age of some of our children now. And they were “driven crazy” by the juxtaposition of two incongruous realities: hundreds of people being killed every week in a far-off nation and the indifferent way an affluent American society was going on its merry way, believing the lies it was told, or choosing to, and pretending those atrocities didn’t happen. Clearly, very few of us today are capable of being driven crazy by the killings in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in many other places around the world, juxtaposed with the popularity of American Idol and Dancing With the Stars. Nero fiddling as Rome burned comes to mind. And of course we don’t want a new breed of Weathermen to arise and start bombing buildings. And yet ... And yet ...
As horrifying as the violence committed by the Weathermen is, there is also a strange “truth” to it. At its center lives the archetypal figure of a college student brought up to believe in courage, morality, and standing up for what you believe in. And he is faced with this awful contradiction that people his age are being killed for no good reason while the country sleeps its way through it. I remember being that age. I remember deciding to go to prison rather than register for the draft (and then the draft ending in the nick of time). I remember feeling that powerful idealistic certainty -- that if we really believe in something we have to be willing to sacrifice for it; otherwise what we say is just bullshit. I remember understanding, though not agreeing, when people said the demonstrations and parades and sit-ins were not doing the trick, that we had to up the ante. I remember the sense of grief and trouble and fear in the room when someone said that.
Whatever there was in the Weather Underground that was good – a sense of unyielding commitment to something they felt was probably suicidal but demanded by their moment in history – we have lost it. Which is to say that our political impotence as citizens and human beings is partly the result of living in a world where truth doesn’t matter. How many times did we watch Bush and Rumsfeld on TV and know – know! – beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were lying through their teeth? That they weren’t even bothering to lie convincingly? And how many times did we think, Well, that’s politicians for you – what do you expect? What’s for dinner, honey?
Why didn’t the invasion of Iraq drive us crazy? Because there’s almost nothing worth fighting for anymore. There’s nothing the American people won’t lie down for, no lie so obvious we won’t believe it, no demagogue so corrupt and idiotic we won’t support her. We have lost the ability to feel the sting of the lie, which means we cannot recognize injustice. CNN lies to us, politicians lie, our friends lie, athletes lie, the Church lies. Everyone lies ... and then we get all uppity and righteous about Wikileaks! Oh gosh, we wouldn’t want anyone exposing any lies!
In a world where there’s far too much going on for anyone to keep up, where our leaders and all our sources of news are inveterate liars, we can’t help but feel the loss of any relationship between words and reality. We stop listening. We stop caring. We cease being citizens. We shut down. We turn inward on our own smaller worlds – our families, our jobs, our inner selves. We forget, if indeed we ever really knew, that an inner self only really exists in counterpoint with an outer world. Our relationships are forged in the crucible of falsehood, and as we burrow further and further into our own navel, forsaking the literature and history aisles for the self-help section, we trade in the madness of political violence for the lunacy of hopelessness and isolation. I don’t really know how to use the word “evil,” but what is evil if not this?
So, as I contemplate the parting words of Wayne Barrett, I can’t help asking myself if this act of pompous self-aggrandizement hasn’t somehow performed an unintentional service. Because it should remind us that it’s no one’s “job” to tell the truth, and that by assigning this role to an occupation, we conveniently absolve ourselves of an inconvenient obligation. Things will get better, not when the politicians, the journalists, the priests, the teachers, the scientists make them better. They will get better when we start seeing things as they really are, when we start “telling the truth,” standing for something, and recovering our faith in the possibility of a society where the fractured bond between word and deed can be repaired.