The Stories We Hear

"History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal."

     - Mark Twain (1835-1910), American humorist, writer

Orson Scott Card has written an interesting essay titled "Rediscovering History" which originally appeared in the Greensboro, NC, newspaper, The Rhinoceros Times, and has been posted on the website, The Ornery American. Card talks about how we use history:

"We fight a war one way because we want to avoid the mistakes that we think caused us to lose the last war; we elect one candidate for office because we think he represents a cause that was worth voting for twenty years before, but might well be irrelevant today. The trouble is that if we don't study history ourselves, we're suckers just waiting for somebody to come up with a lie that he surrounds with all kinds of 'facts' that, in our ignorance, we think are actually true."

He uses the record of Genghis Khan's reign as an illustration. Khan, as popularly believed, was a devil who committed atrocity after atrocity. The truth, Card says, is quite different. He cites research by Jack Weatherford in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World that presents Khan as a pretty good guy whose biography got re-written by Chinese and Russian conquerors.

Another of Card's illustrations refers to historian Gavin Menzies' book, 1421: The Year China Discovered America:

"Menzies makes a strong case for Chinese navigators reaching both the west and east coasts of North and South America seventy years before Columbus."

Neither of these books, Card says, is a re-interpretation of what actually happened, but revisionism based on the discovery of new historical evidence. Both are good examples of historians challenging the accepted accounts of events and getting at what really happened.

Card then takes a look at some of the recent past and suggests that the journalists who are writing the stories we read have begun creating their own version of events rather than making objective observations and recording those events, as a good newsperson should. That is to say, they're writing their news, or history if you will, with a slant which tends to mislead their readers, not unlike the Chinese and Russian historians did with poor old Genghis Khan.

Phil Lucas, Executive Editor for the The News Herald, Panama City, FL, has penned an op-ed titled "Enough to Make You Sick" that adds credence to Card's thesis:

"When the press reports about Iraq and virtually all other contested issues in the news, ineptitude is the rule. This is true of television and also of print reporting. We zero in on the worst thing that happens, time after time, day after day, the effect of which is to present the worst thing as the norm, even when it is only one-tenth of the whole story. For good measure, we throw in our personal opinions, arrogantly certain they are correct."

Lucas uses the president's recent press conference as an example:

"Reporter after reporter couched questions in the negative, assuming the worst was true, knowing the worst was true, looking for the kill. They used words like failure, defeat and mistake, time after time. That's not reporting. That's not seeking truth. That's an agenda. Smelling blood, the pack salivated for an apology from the president.

On this point I agree. An apology is in order. So here it is. I am sorry our storytellers have us by the neck. We are better than they picture us. We are better than they are. As an editor, I apologize to Americans for the national disgrace of inept and self-indulgent journalists, who hound after the worst and ugliest to the exclusion of much else, who strut their opinions with conceit, and who spew it all forth upon the public and call it news."

Do we have a problem with our media today? Are they so intent on the sensational that they fail to execute the basics? Certainly you cannot paint them all with the same brush, but Card and Lucas make good points, many of which I'm inclined to agree with.