Will Truth Rise Again?

NEW YORK, March 28, 2005 – Maybe because it was the Easter weekend, or because I was replaying Bruce's 911 hymn "The Rising," or, maybe, because I was meditating on the difficulty we journalists have in reporting or establishing "truth" but I thought back on a famous saying which I first heard come out of the always eloquent lips of Martin Luther King, Jr., in a union hall in lower Manhattan early in the 1960's.

He closed a sermon of a speech that I will never forget with a famous quotation: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again."

Let's hope so.

Today, we live in two worlds of news and information. One is "fact based," the other "faith-based." In the former, we cling to a world of objective reporting and verifiable evidence even as we know how facts are skewed by media outlets with undisclosed agendas; in the latter, we only acknowledge facts that support our opinions and often don't let facts get in the way of a "good argument."

As the late Sen. Patrick Daniel Moynihan put it: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Look at the debate over Terri Schiavo. Two worldviews are in conflict. It's not really the right to die versus the right to live because many of the self-proclaimed right-to-lifers who rally at the side of a terminally brain-dead woman support capital punishment, As it turns out, their biggest political backer, Tom Delay, was part of a family decision years ago to pull the plug on his own dad. The contradictions on display are too blatant and thick to even fully dissect.

"Their" media supports them uncritically. Judges and journalists who studied the details of the affidavits and medical records, and begged to differ, are baited as murderers and discredited by the ether of emotive passion. The courts finally ruled against Terri's parents in one of the most litigated cases in history.

Truth crushed to earth?

Another question: what is the truth of the Iraq war? A prominent media critic who just shared a panel with me revealed that she recently interviewed many leading TV news anchors that could not agree on the causes. "I was shocked by their lack of a consensus," she said.

So now we learn that they all reported the war the same way but did not really believe what they were saying.

Think of the last election. At one point President Bush acknowledged that there was no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and that no WMDs were found in Iraq.

He said it – wink, wink – but a majority of supporters wouldn't change their long reinforced views. They told pollsters they still believed the weapons were still there and that Iraq is part of the war on al Qaeda to avenge 9/11. The GOP campaign did not correct them.

It seems to take a long time for truth to trickle out, or up, under the mounds of misinformation suffocating us all. In a new book called "American Monsters," I write about president William McKinley who launched the Spanish-American War with the slogan "Remember the Maine."

Thanks to the yellow journalists of that era, Americans were convinced that the war was justified because Spanish terrorists blew up our battleship in Havana Harbor. Fifty years later, we learned that the ship went down because of an accident in the engine room.

Truth tends to rise when it no longer matters

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena's account of being fired on by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The intelligence agent who rescued her from kidnappers was killed in the incident.

My reporting on what she said happened – based on accounts in her newspaper – quickly came under less lethal fire, but fire all the same. Some of those "all-the-way-with-the-U.S.A." bloggers went to work to demolish her claims and discredit her as a communist who was probably supporting terrorists. This character assassination sought to silence her.