Lies and the Lying Liars Who Spread Them
So I think I'm overdue for a rant and now is as good a time as any. Free speech is not working. The professed goal of free speech is multifold but a primary objective is getting at the truth. The problem is that when all the lovely philosophers and founding fathers came to this conclusion, they were living in a world without our modern mass media and the evils that accompany it. Nowadays it just isn't politically correct to call a spade a spade. When Bush and his cronies do something reprehensible the media tries to come up with some blemish on Kerry to report at the same time for balance. Same thing in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Palestinian terrorists blow up a schoolbus full of children but Israel accidentally shot a civilian when fighting house to house with militants. Two unrelated incidents and of completely incomparable magnitude. Yet when reported together they seem to take on a moral equivalence. Bush clearly lied and took us to war based on misinformation but Kerry misquoted the cost at $200 billion instead of $120 billion. Why does the media try to equate the two? I think there are a lot of reasons for the quandarry we are in today. One is that the individuals who own all the media sources in the country are consolidating and they have an agenda to push that isn't particularly in the interests of the public good or bringing out truth and accurate information. A second is that American's would much rather sit on their couches drinking beer and watching sports than actually know what is going on in the world in the sort of depth required to make informed decisions. This gets reflected in the news due to supply/demand and chasing ratings. Stories are superficial, often irrelevant to the important issues of our day, and skewed towards sports/culture/celebrity and away from legitimate sociopolitical concerns. A third reason and perhaps the one that angers me the most is a class of people who intentionally deny the truth and spread lies for the purpose of furthering their own nefarious goals. Giving such people a public forum and a voice for their agenda is not conducive to bringing the general population to any sort of grasp of the truth. The prime example I would cite is the phenomenon of anti-Israel groups on college campuses. The average student doesn't care too much about what is happening on the other side of the world and is definitely not interested in doing thorough research to find out. Anti-Israel propaganda machines can churn out more volume than can be intelligently refuted and the result is that the general population becomes prejudiced by the slanted materials. The best Israel activists can do is to launch a similar propaganda campaign with the result being the complete obscuration of the truth and a public sense of equivlence between the two causes. This is a tradgedy for those who value truth for its own sake, as there is no way to have any sort of reasonable fact driven dialogue that reaches the public ears when flashy attack ads are so easy to disburse widely with no checks or balances for veracity. I propose that individuals and organizations that deal in known lies and distortions be held accountable for their actions and if it can be proved they knowingly lied, there should be either civil or criminal penalties imposed, or both. This would be similar to current laws regarding slander and liable but it would apply to any form of speech with the end of misinforming the public. Democracy is based on an informed and empowered citizenry that can vote based on clear facts tempered by personal conviction and perspective. When truth is shrouded by lies, it is impossible for true democracy to survive.
