By G.D. Maxwell
"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."
— Samuel Butler
"Truth is truth."
— William Shakespeare
"That depends on what the meaning of is is."
— William Jefferson Clinton
Given a fair chance, I’ll usually tell the truth. The biggest problem with the truth is that people are very rarely interested in hearing it. In fact, people are so used to not hearing the truth, truth slips past them like a shadowy apparition, a scurrying mouse in a darkened room you’re not quite sure you really saw.
Don’t believe me? Try this. Next time you dine out, or the time after that if you get lucky next time, tell your waiter the truth when he or she inevitably asks, "How is everything?"
How many times have you overheard the people at the next table – or perhaps at your very own table – complain about the indifferent service, mediocre food and laughable pricing or haute pretension through two courses only to answer with a meek, "Fine; everything’s fine." when faced with that question?
Tell the truth next time. Say something like, "The veal made me wish I were a vegan and whatever was on the side reminded me uncomfortably of what they market as gourmet dog food."
Chances are you’ll get that same vacuous, middle-distance focused stare. Somewhere between the table and the kitchen, the waiter may hesitate and wonder whether he or she actually heard you right.
But I for one still choose truth. Trouble is, I’m never sure which truth: unvarnished or shaded. Yeah, yeah, I know all about sins of omission. But like the restaurant example above, it’s in the shading of truth social discourse is rooted.
I prefer truth simply because I squandered whatever tricks of memory one needs to possess to be a good liar. It doesn’t really matter though. We’ve all been lied to so frequently and so publicly by politicians, captains of industry, marketers, teachers and friends we may as well be living life in a travelling carnival.
Unless you’re a journalist.
Just last week, the National Post – formerly the right-wing rabble rag of Lord Black of Crossharbour, himself as scurrilous a liar as ever bled a company dry – fired Brad Evenson, a senior journalist who covered the world of medicine, for fabricating quotes on a number of his stories. Unlike the novella-length mea culpa published by the New York Times last year when Jason Blair – or Bliar, as he’s come to be known – was found to have pretty well made up whole stories, the Post’s editor cryptically referred to quotes not made by the people cited but stressed no medical information was fabricated.
So here’s a guy who wrote good stuff, accurately, but fudged the quotes. Jeez, guys, isn’t that a bit anal in a world rife with outright lies?
This would probably be a good place to point out that I’m not a journalist. I’m not trying to distance myself from journalists. Some of my best friends are journalists. It doesn’t have anything to do with journalists as a group being about as popular and trusted as Reno divorce lawyers. I just don’t have the bona fides to support a claim of journalistic training or integrity. Everything I know about ethics I learned in law school – that oughta tell you everything you need to know.
But I’m concerned that real journalists are setting an impossibly high bar for themselves, especially now that no one trusts them enough to want to talk to them.
I mean, someone claiming to be named Enn Raudsepp – look that up in your Book of Aliases – who purports to be director of the journalism department at Concordia, itself supposedly a university in Montreal, said, "I think they (journalists who, I guess, make up quotes) should be drummed out of the profession." Lighten up, Enn, if that’s your real name. It’s a new millennium. Truth is so passé.
Admittedly, mine is a minority view. And, like I said, I’m not a journalist. Anyone who believes anything they read in Maxed Out does so at their own risk.
But this whole "truth" thing used to worry me. In fact, it worried me so much that shortly after I began to write features for Pique, I asked our esteemed editor, Bob "Voice of Reason" Barnett exactly what it meant to him when something – hypothetically something I wrote – was in quotation marks.
Like a good journalist and editor, Bob gave me a puzzled look. The kind of look I suspected he’d give me if I asked him whether the sun rose in the east that morning. He thought about his answer carefully… or he just spent time wondering what kind of a moron I was, hard to tell. And then he said, and I’ll never forget his words, "It means the person being quoted said it." Full stop.
I nodded in agreement, a slightly perplexed look telegraphing my unease with his answer.
After a long pause, not unknown in conversations with Bob, being such a thoughtful, reasoned thinker, he said, "What does it mean to you?"
I think he hoped that was a rhetorical question. I racked my brain wondering what he wanted me to say, searching for the right answer, the shaded truth. Finally, resignedly, I opted for the true truth and said, "Yeah, that’s what it means to me too. That the person being quoted said it. Well, that they said it or said something remarkably close to it given people’s tendency to not speak in tight, formal sentences. Well, or that if they’d really given the question some thought, they probably would have said it. Or, if they weren’t complete morons who couldn’t string an original, witty thought into a coherent sentence they’d have said it. Or, failing all that, that they won’t possibly remember what they said and will think what I said they said is pretty damn good and they won’t raise the issue given how much better they sound now that I’ve put words in their mouths. But remember, I’m not a journalist."
Bob shook his head sagely. "I’m beginning to understand that," was all he said.
So I think it’s time to cut the real journalists some slack. This whole truth thing is being taken too far. If everybody thinks journalists are untrustworthy to begin with – and especially in light of the trend for people to only read what they agree with already – why strive for the unattainable?
I think it was Mark Twain who said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Or maybe it was someone else. What’s it really matter?
