More on Truth — Cautionary Tales, Both Ancient and New

All week, the theme of “truth” has leapt from the pages of the Mass readings. In Monday’s reading from Chapter 13 of Daniel, two vile “elders of the people” try to force Susanna, “a very beautiful and God-fearing woman,” to have sex with them. When she refuses they falsely accuse her of adultery and try to have her stoned to death. Daniel interrogates them separately, and he proves their lies because their stories don’t match. (Fun fact: This “Rule of Witness Exclusion” is still used in courts today. For example, in US Federal Courts, Evidence Rule 615 provides that “At a party’s request, the court must order witnesses excluded so that they cannot hear other witnesses’ testimony. Or the court may do so on its own.” State courts have their own versions of the rule.)

In Wednesday’s Gospel, Jesus states, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (Jn. 8:31-32.) In the case of Susanna, the truth set her free quite literally. But we know that damage from lies can also be spiritual. Serious lies, distortions, and manipulations not only damage the soul of the deceiver, but they also keep the recipients from living in the truth, and can plunge them into despair, consign them to ignorance, or even cause them to sin, all great evils. He Who is Truth is our spiritual guardrail, if we would only take Him seriously and follow Him.

Catch and Kill

Which brings me to a very contemporary version of Susanna-and-the-elders, which has been playing out in New York City and Los Angeles. It has much to tell us about our media and the shaping of “truth.” As most everyone has heard, superstar movie producer Harvey Weinstein is now serving a 23-year prison sentence following his February convictions in New York for “rape” and “criminal sex act” against an aspiring actress and a production assistant, respectively. Though only currently convicted on two counts, he has been accused of mistreating many women over the course of decades. But it’s his manipulation of the media to protect himself and punish or silence his accusers that should give us all pause, because we all consume media, and we all seek the truth.

Journalist Ronan Farrow won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for his The New Yorker magazine articles exposing Weinstein’s predations. He revealed that actresses and assistants, including some well-known film stars, feared retaliation – industry blackballing, lost job opportunities – for opposing Weinstein. In his magazine articles and in his follow-up book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (Little, Brown and Company 2019), Farrow revealed Weinstein’s media manipulation techniques: circulate negative rumors and plant disparaging stories in the media, branding a woman who rejected him as “difficult” to work with or otherwise tearing her down; and/or, have a media outlet run by someone friendly to him “catch” a woman’s story by paying for exclusive rights to the account, then “kill” the story by refusing to publish it – the “Catch and Kill” of the title. (Farrow makes clear in his book that Weinstein is neither the inventor of, nor the sole beneficiary of, “catch and kill”.)

Which raises the question: What is in the news, or in media more broadly, and why is it there? And, is it true, or does is just “sound” true? Conversely, what isn’t there that should be?

“Truthiness” Is No Laughing Matter

Back in 2005, late-night comedian Stephen Colbert was looking for a word. The word, he later told The New York Times Magazine, had to be “sublimely idiotic” to fit with the bombastic alter-ego persona he would debut that night on his new show. The term he coined is “truthiness,” and it has had staying power. It even appears in some dictionaries, defined as “the quality of seeming to be true according to one’s intuition, opinion, or perception, without regard to logic, factual evidence, or the like[.]” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/truthiness But “truthiness” isn’t new. In fact, one alternative term for it might be “propaganda.”

Of course, propaganda is as old as mankind itself (viz. the Garden of Eden). And we err if we think ourselves too smart or too well-informed to fall for it. Pondering the topic of “truth” and its manipulations has prompted me to re-read Sue Ellen Browder’s powerful memoir Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement (Ignatius Press 2015), wherein she writes about the lies — the propaganda – she told as a women’s magazine writer in the late 1960s:

The 1960s’ women’s movement . . . grew out of a genuine cry for justice. . . . The 1960s’ sexual revolution was an altogether different matter. . . . [T]he sex revolution was based largely on “half truth, limited truth, and truth out of context.” (fn) That is to say, the sex revolution was fabricated largely from propaganda. I know because I was one of the propagandists who helped sell single women on the notion that sex outside of marriage would set them free.

Effective propaganda is subtle and emotionally appealing, and she notes that “[a]s a form of withheld truth, propaganda can be 90 percent true. It’s the deceptive 10 percent that gets you.”

One of the most devastating things Browder reveals is how the tireless, truth-twisting efforts of one largely unknown man, Larry Lader, a “master propagandist,” changed the course of U.S. history. Lader’s singular focus was the legalization of abortion, and Browder describes his 1966 book of the same name as “a convoluted blend of fact and fiction so intricately interlaced only an extremely well-educated and diligent historian could pry the two apart”; furthermore, much of the legal “history” of abortion in the book was flat-out invented. Nevertheless, Lader not only “grafted abortion onto the women’s movement but five years later [his work] became a legal pillar for the Roe v. Wade decision.”

“Truthiness” is no joke.

I encourage you to read the book. I guarantee it will shock you.