So Much News, So Little Truth

The hot topic this week has been inside information--in the Stewart-Cramer dustup, the Madoff mess, the Seymour Hersh blurtout about a Bush-Cheney "executive assassination ring." In a 24/7 flood of facts, factoids and fake news, who finds the truth and who tells it?

Barack Obama won the White House with promises of transparency to voters starved for some sense of reality in a world of flimflam and lies that have led to so much social devastation.

Yet truth-telling has traditionally been not the job of politicians but journalists. Half a century ago, as a newly appointed magazine editor, I was baited at a dinner party by the French war bride of a college classmate who was running a tabloid newspaper. "What is it exactly that you do?" she persisted

Since philosophical questions were not on the menu, I answered offhandedly, "Try to tell people the truth."

"Ah," she replied in triumph, "the truth! Camus doesn't know the truth, but you do."

For journalism, the goal has never been cosmic verities but everyday truth. It still is, but the world has become so sophisticated that we now find ourselves in a muddle over what the meaning of "is" is.

Jon Stewart's cri de coeur over "business journalism" reflects the loss of that function to what his Comedy Central colleague Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness," entertaining falsehoods, which viewers of CNBC to their regret took for facts and bet their shirts on.

Their mistake was a bookend to that of Bernard Madoff's victims who were eager to become privileged "in the know" insiders and now, according to hard-nosed New York Times business reporter Joe Nocera, are looking for someone else to fault:

"People did abdicate responsibility--and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves."

Those journalists still obsessed with getting below the surface are likely to get as much abuse as acclaim. Bob Woodward has morphed from the hero of Watergate to what some jealous colleagues unjustly called a lapdog of the powerful to gain access for his remarkable reporting.

And now Hersh's remarks this week are leading not to outrage and further investigation of his charges but to media silence and, of course, Conservative attacks on his character.

Reason exhumes a four-year-old piece entitled "Sy Hersh Says It's Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)," from New York Magazine, not the most objective observer of his prize-winning reporting in the rival New Yorker, which accuses him of nothing worse than sometimes getting ahead of himself in his passion to uncover official deception.

With all this, and millions of bloggers to boot, the flow of inside information is still somehow leaving us, on the important questions, out in the cold.

Empty-Calories News

The New York Times is too dignified for silly-season journalism, August fluff when the world slows down. But this year, especially from Washington, there is a lot of fact-free fare.

The other day, there was “Competitors, Once Collegial, Now Seem Cool,” about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Today we get “First Father: Tough Times on Sidelines,” 31 paragraphs of empty-calories reporting about Bush 41 and Bush 43.

Based on “interviews with a broad range of people close to both presidents,” the piece reveals that the elder Bush “finds it tough to watch his son get criticized from the sidelines.”

From a combination of rehash, such as Bob Woodward’s anecdote about Dubya consulting only a “higher father” before invading Iraq, and dribble from new interviewees, that criticism of the elder Bush’s son “wears on his heart and soul,” we get the equivalent of what editors used to call a “thumbsucker,” a rumination devoid of news.

That used to be the province of columnists and commentators but now is disguised as reporting--and tenuous reporting at that. The Hillary-Barack scoop had to be followed by a correction of one of its few anecdotes: that “after the State of the Union address, Mrs. Clinton took a circuitous route past Mr. Obama not to avoid him, but to accommodate a television producer.”

As the old “Front Page” crowd used to say, this stuff is dynamite.