My Swiss friend, Reuben Leuchter, was offered a position at a
Jewish institution of higher learning which was known to be heavily
in debt. Before responding, he checked with an acquaintance who was
a former employee of that school. The fellow told him, “Take the
job and you’ll be fine, but just remember one thing. No matter how
inconvenient it is for you to come in on payday, you must be there
to pick up your check in person on that day.”
“Really? Why?” my friend wondered.
“Because on payday it’s salary and salary comes first, as the
Bible says. But a day later it’s just a new debt and then you go to
the back of the line!”
That piquant observation provides an insight which is key to
understanding the press and its infrequent flirtations with the
truth. Once again we see how the story of a horrible bungle by the
Obama administration has turned into a referendum on whether Mitt
Romney was too quick to criticize. As observers we are astonished
by this persistent commitment of a free press to voluntarily
corrupt truth in favor of a particular political viewpoint.
Truth is the only path to knowledge, to understanding, to
growth, to correction, to acceptance, to all good things. In a free
society, we rely desperately on reporters to deliver the news so we
can assess just where we are at any given moment. We cannot be in
all places at all times but some rootless vagabond who works for
NBC can, even as he dreams of someday sitting in one place every
night next to a beautiful anchorwoman. That geek has a sacred duty
to bring us the truth without fear or favor. Unfortunately, like
most sacred duties, that one is honored these days in the
breach.
Yet here and there the power of truth forces it to the surface.
In what Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling “random acts of
journalism” we are periodically treated to flashes of dazzling
accuracy in media. Some of the most reliable leftist outposts can
suddenly, shockingly, tell some truth.
But as my friend’s story reminds us, the truth can only be found
on the first day. Particularly on the Internet, where news finds
its way immediately, we get one screen shot of reality before the
murk machine begins its muddying. I guess the first day it’s news
but the second day it’s analysis, the first day it’s fact and
henceforth it is interpretation.
One of the most fascinating culprits in this area is Associated
Press headline writing. Follow any AP story on your favorite news
site and watch the headline morph. Usually it starts out something
like GLOOMY JOB REPORT WEIGHING ON STOCKS. After a while it becomes
EMPLOYMENT FIGURES GOOD BUT LESS THAN EXPECTED. Finally it settles
in at JOB REPORT POINTS TO PATTERN OF LONG-TERM RECOVERY.
In the Egypt and Libya story several days ago, this approach was
seen clearly. The initial reports told of the chaos at the
embassies, the cluelessness of diplomatic staff and the misguided
effort to have the embassies offer negative reviews of the Muhammed
movie as a strategy to avoid fire in the theater of operations. We
even read that the rioters chanted, “Obama, we are all Osamas
now.”
This inflammatory material, with its bad vibe for the
Obama-Clinton foreign policy brain trust, has been broomed now in
favor of the revisionist version. It’s all about Mitt having a fit,
Mitt being in a snit, Mitt picking a nit. The second coming of
Jimmy Carter has just piled up four corpses in the midst of its
Arab Springtime but the only culprit who has been apprehended was
Willard Romney, using his gangsta name of “Mitt.”
Mock me if you will but I still cling to a naïve hope that a
generation of reporters can be taught to love truth more than
whatever blandishments are offered by its competitors. For now we
have to settle for peeks into those little windows of time where
the wash is clean and fresh, before the spin cycle begins.
In parting, I should mention that a friend of mine asked the
late Rabbi Chaim Zimmerman, a genius scholar and wit, whether
historians could be trusted to convey the past accurately. He
answered: “If the papers are already lying about what happened
yesterday, what hope is there of the truth being told a hundred
years later?”
Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Ruth Homnick,
a lover of truth, on the
44th
anniversary of her passing.
