I try to stay away from discussing the news on this blog, but it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore some of the insanity that seems to be going on all around us. I read an article yesterday about a poll that had been taken asking people to pick the first word (one word) that came to mind when the President’s name was mentioned. I’m sure this poll, like most, was biased to some degree, but the list of words was pretty extensive, and none of them was flattering. One word that didn’t make the list was “truth.”
Of course that got me to thinking about truth… what the heck is truth anyhow? Usually I go to the dictionary for a definition and then go from there, but it seems to me that truth is simply the way things really are. Obviously, that’s an over simplification, especially today… some people think there is no absolute truth — truth for them is simply what they think. Actually, we all live our lives based on things we think, or believe, are true. We get into elevators that we believe will go up — or down, we get on airplanes we believe will fly, we go to stadiums believing the game will be played….
Time magazine published an issue fairly recently with no picture on the cover, only the words “Is Truth Dead?” One of the articles in that issue was titled, “Can Trump Handle the Truth” and contained an itemized list of a lot of the untruths tweeted by the President and floating around his administration. Seems like since January, we’ve read and heard mostly about “fake” news almost constantly… so much so, that it’s truly hard to distinguish “real” from “fake.” The TV program 60 Minutes devoted part of a recent program to fake news and interviewed a number of people that deliberately distribute fake news. Obviously Facebook and social media sites are a prime target of fake news, but some amount makes its way into the mainstream media. Interestingly, the program concluded that it wasn’t the uneducated that were most likely to believe these things, it was the college educated!
It appears to me that one of the problems facing politics and the news media today is, for lack of a better word, ideology. The news media often simply omits any news that they don’t like or agree with.
I took a couple of journalism courses in college and one of the first basic rules that was stressed, was the necessity to distinguish between reporting and editorializing. That line seems to have become very, very blurred lately.
So I think answer to the question on Time’s cover (Is Truth Dead?) is no, but it’s maybe close to being on life support…
I ran across a quote a few days ago and I’m sorry I don’t know who to contribute it to, but I think it’s very appropriate for today: “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. the man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others…..”
I guess truth, like most other things, will remain subjective, even though I don’t believe truth is subjective. Winston Churchill once stated, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” That seems to be about where we are…
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