Telling lies in the age of transparency

Social media, Google, and Wikileaks – not to mention prying government and big business – were supposed to make us all a lot more transparent. The thinking goes there’s very little about our lives that is secret anymore – or is likely to be secret for long.

So why tell your new date that you’re a company CEO when a search engine can easily reveal that you’ve just gotten out of prison.

Decide it would fun to take your top off in a bar and a score of cell phone cameras will send images of your bare breasts across the web. Forget about keeping that Miss America crown.

These days it’s easy for a company to search public records and Facebook accounts to ferret out the truth and lies hidden in resume and job applications. In fact, the only reason the dark secrets of your past stay out of sight is when others don’t really try to find them.

With so much information so accessible to so many people why does anyone think they can get away with anything?

Now let’s be clear. We all lie at one time or another. Usually it’s to avoid conflict with someone or fudge the truth so that our behavior looks a little better. Sometimes we simply convince ourselves that events transpired a certain way when they really didn’t. Police and prosecutors are well aware that witness memories can be notoriously unreliable.

But how do you explain some of the more outrageous lies that have been part of the public consciousness in recent times. Why does a public figure tell a personal story that can be easily proven false by the public record?

A few months ago Connecticut Attorney General (and U.S. Senate candidate) Richard Blumenthal created a fictional Vietnam War record.  In speeches he said: “I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse” endured by returning vets. Problem is he was one of those fortunate sons who took advantage of the draft law to secure a series of deferments so he could attend college and even do an internship with DC publishing magnet Katherine Graham. When it looked as if his luck might be running out he wrangled his way into a Marine Reserve unit that wasn’t going anywhere.

We tell small lies designed to keep us out of trouble and avoid conflict. We fudge the truth about our accomplishments to impress someone and even if we know what we’re doing in the beginning soon we accept the lie as whole truth. That seems to be what happened with Blumenthal. He repeated the story so many times and embellished it so much it probably began to believe it himself. Believing didn’t make it so.

More recently, Shirley Sherrod, an African-American woman, was fired from her job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture when a video appears in which she seemed to say she hadn’t helped a white farmer as much as she could. After being held up as an example of black racism a different story emerged.

She was the victim of a truly shabby lie propagated by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and swallowed whole by the media and public officials. The video was carefully edited from a speech by Sharrod that told a story of redemption and changed attitudes. The white farmer spoke up for Sherrod declaring that she had fought successfully to save his land from foreclosure.

Why did Breitbart believe he could get away it? Didn’t he realize someone would bother to look a little further? Didn’t he think it might tarnish his own reputation?

Maybe he just knew that his audience wouldn’t really care one way or another.

The public is quite gullible when it comes to false stories that seem to fit with their deeply held beliefs. Think of the fictional “death panels” or a thousand other conspiracy theories such as Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

If a story reflects a “larger truth” such as black racism directed at whites, then it doesn’t really matter whether it actually happened or not. And, perhaps that’s one of the biggest reasons that lying is still so common and so obvious.

Steal my story, please!

Usually writers don’t consider the taking and reusing of their work without permission and compensation a good thing. Although there are many people who have a hard time understanding the concept, it’s much like walking into a store, picking up a purse and thinking you can take it without presenting a credit card to the cashier. Besides, with the low rates many outlets pay these days you may feel as if you’ve already been robbed.

That’s why the move by the non-profit ProPublica site to make  its investigative reporting freely available for republication just a little bit startling. In fact, they even provide advice on how to use their  content under a section entitled Steal Our Stories. If you want something, there’s a handy “republish” button to the right of the byline on every story.

Obviously they want their brand of public interest journalism to get as a wide a play as possible. With the internet so fragmented it’s hard to build an audience and gain readership.

Unfortunately, it also reflects the continuing trend of making creative work available for free on the internet and in the process cheapening the work done by its creators.

This is nothing new and it’s been a source of continuing debate. It speaks to the lack of a viable business model for online publications, as much as, the willingness of writers to work for nothing or next to nothing (think content mills and $5 assignments.)

As freelancers, we’ve all worked, at one time or another, for someone who placed little value on the materials we created. Rather than professionals we were regarded as something akin to unskilled field hands. Sometimes they were businesses, but probably just as often they were editors and publishers who should know better.

People given to shock at the images of desperate people breaking into a New Orleans Wal-Mart for food, think nothing of lifting and republishing an article they didn’t pay for.

I came across magazine articles I had previously written being sold on Amazon. When I pointed this out to the magazine’s editor, she was baffled. They had no idea how the material  had found its way in downloadable electronic format to the “world’s largest bookseller.”

Obviously, I don’t have an answer to this problem. In a world where information is so freely available and few consumers are willing to pay for access, earning a living writing is getting more difficult. Yet, since there is no free lunch somebody has to pay for the stories you read. Maybe the payment comes in poor writing and shoddy reporting. Maybe the author is really working for the business or politician being profiled or the product being touted. It probably isn’t a disinterested party seeking the truth.

Have you found your work used without permission? What did you do about it?

Fort Hood coverage shows media at its best – and mostly worst

Image by flickr user: dane brian Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

 When word first came of the shooting at Fort Hood I, like every one else, was transfixed. A new, but somehow very familiar, horror was unfolding. A gunman had opened fire at unarmed military personnel as they prepared for deployment to overseas combat zones.

The news media in the form of cable news did what it does best – and worst – as it reported on every new development both real and rumor. As the causalities and the number of shooters mounted, my emotions went from horror to fear. It had to be another terrorist incident and unbelievably it was taking place on a military base on U.S. soil. This was the safest place a solider could be, we thought. Now another illusion was being shattered and I dreaded what the aftermath might be.

Of course, the media eventually straightened the story out. It was a lone gunman. Another solider being deployed to a foreign war who appeared to have snapped under pressure. That was bad, but maybe not as bad as what we had first thought. A military psychiatrist named Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was solely responsible for the carnage. 

But, once again, the media is reflecting our worst fears. Read the name again – Hasan. Muslim. That quickly ignited another wave of outrage and hysteria. On cable news and the bloggersphere the calls were quick – and predictable. Investigate every Muslim and find out who’s loyal and who’s not urged one Fox News commentator. The usual suspects among our cadre of conservative opinionators are already doing their best to whip up fear and hatred of Muslims and paint Islam as a religion of violence – never mind that most Muslims are as horrified as everyone else.

Whether this incident will lead to heightened discrimination against them remains to be seen.

The coverage of this event, like some many others, now comes fast and furious and to an alarming extend unfiltered. Before the advent of the 24 hour cable news cycle and its attendant Internet coverage (amazingly not that long ago), events like this would have gotten straightened out before they made their way into the daily newspaper and even evening news. The rumors wouldn’t have been passed along without verification and when most people heard (or read) the story it would have already been close to an accurate account.

Reading a story in the newspaper also tended to produce less emotion than watching it unfold minute by painful minute on television.

The coverage illustrates both the good and bad of modern news coverage and how for viewers it is mostly bad. Bad because it traumatizes us and that isn’t likely to change. Neither the cameras nor the public is going to look away.

How do I know if you mean what you say when you say what you mean?

 “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

As writers we use words to describe events, convey ideas and – we hope – provide a glimpse of the truth. Words are our stock in trade and the tools that allow us to provide readers with glimpses of other realities.

But how effective are we in describing what we believe to be “reality?” And, what is our responsibility to ensure that we’re really telling the truth in our work? Most of us may not spend a lot of time musing about “truth” because we believe we’re usually doing a good job of being accurate and getting the facts straight. Yet, if we’re doing any kind of journalistic writing (whether for newspapers, magazines or trade journals) we need to be aware that our readers approach our work with more than a little skepticism.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported recently that its surveys show the public’s belief in accuracy of news stories has hit the lowest level in more than two decades.  Only 29% of Americans say that the media generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are “often inaccurate.”

That dismal showing should concern all of us – not just full time newspaper editors and reporters. The loss of the faith obviously has many reasons ranging from partisan perceptions of bias to well published scandals such as those involving Jason Blair and Stephen Glass.

Many people also have a hard time distinguishing between, say, Fox News straight news programs and its endless array of talking politicals heads. No one should confuse Glenn Beck with a journalist. In fact the network even directs its reporters to avoid appearing on the opinion shows. That hasn’t stopped the White House from attacking the network for bias.

Reporters are all too aware of how hard it is to capture an idea or even an event in words. Words become only an approximation of reality, but never reality itself. Writers of all kinds are limited by their own knowledge and access to sources of information. Even when they witness the event itself, they may only see part of what is actually happening.

And, the part that makes its way into the story may not be the part that critical – and highly biased – readers want to see. Both the political left and right believe the media isn’t telling the truth and is – fairly or unfairly – biased in favor of the “other side.” This partisan vise demonstrates that the middle of the road is sometimes the most dangerous place to be. Yet, for journalists who want to tell the truth there really is no other place to be.