Alas, not all reporters are Clark Kent and Lois Lane seeking truth and justice. Indeed like Ahab from Moby Dick, the majority of reporters are obsessed by that great beast known as a "good story".
Let's be sure of our definitions here. A "good story" is something that arouses strong emotion in the reader/viewer. It's resemblance to the truth is absolutely secondary.
It is also something which is easy to replicate as we move into a second and possibly third generation in which the concept of moral absolutes has eroded into moral relativism.
Moral absolutes (the immutable truth) calibrates the 'BS meter' which operates instinctively in all of us. If that compass is not set it makes it stunningly simple to fall for even the most obvious of hoaxes.
And so it is in journalism where truth has become so malleable that an outright lie can be told to justify an aim. In this case to negatively influence opinion against US president George W Bush and the Iraq war.
Through Tim Blair we learn of a massive two year hoax in which reporter Jaimie Reynolds wrote a series of letters to a student newspaper The Daily Egyptian posing as Kodee Kennings, a little girl whose father served in Iraq. The poignant letters begged her father not to be killed and then bagged the president when he was 'killed in action'.
To keep up the deception Reynolds 'hired' a little girl to pose as Kodee. The child and her parents were persuaded that she was taking part in a documentary filmed by hidden cameras.
While 'professional' journalists report this with a straight face, those who have a fragment of decency will realise that the mainstream media should not be casting the first stone.
When members of the Fourth Estate, Nicky and I were told a hilarious story from a former editor. In the 1950s while a young reporter, he was sent into a small country town to find anything that would make a front page story for the rural weekly.
Alas he came back empty handed. Not to worry, said the editor who immediately began pounding away at his typewriter. What emerged was a poignant tale of a disaffected sailor who, unable to cope with post-war life and the horrors he's seen at sea walks inland with his oar and vows to continue walking until no-one recognises what the paddle is for.
The piece ran on the front page and such a "good story" was picked up by the city papers as well. One sent a team to find this sailor, take some pictures and get the story for themselves.
They were bitterly disappointed, our newly retired editor laughed; the sailor did not exist, the story was made up. In fact it uncannily resembles a section from a war film. (Possibly Humphrey Bogart's 1943 Action In The North Atlantic in which a character expresses that wish while cast adrift after his ship is sunk. If anyone can identify the film, I'd be grateful.)
That's a relatively harmless deception unlike:
Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer winning effort downplaying the Soviet famines that killed millions.
Janet Cooke's 1981 award-winning effort in which she made up the story of an 8-year-old crack addict living in Washington DC.
While discussing the Little Orphan Kodee incident, Buzz Harsher quite rightly points out:
According to post-modern “theory,” there is no Truth; there is only Narrative. Journalism has embraced the post-modern paradigm.
The next time you hear “According to X, Y is so,” rather than “Y is so,” or “Y is not so,” you are hearing the victory of Narrative over Truth.
To put it more plainly yet, here is an example I use for primary school children when speaking on media:
What is the difference between these two sentences?
Teacher: Where is Johnny?
Billy: Johnny went to the library.
Teacher: Where is Johnny?
Billy: Johnny said he was going to the library.
That is the difference between absolute truth and relative truth. The second subtly places doubt on the veracity of Johnny's actions.
Even those sources that educate aspiring writers to be credible fact-checkers falls into the morass of moral relativism. I've highlighted the offending words in bold. Try reading the piece without them and see how much stronger and more truthful it is:
Print media have a long-established standard of quality of information. Granted, the safety net has many holes, as evidenced by the Jayson Blair debacle at The New York Times in 2003, in which a hard-charging young reporter basically lied, made up quotes and stole information from colleagues at other newspapers and put his byline on the concoctions.
Basically lied? No, he lied, full stop, period.
We as a society stop equivocating on 'what is truth' and start stating it honestly and earnestly.
-- Nora
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