‘Pratt’ Chat: Collegians Defend Cheating

Read my lip service.

Americans preach honesty to their children while passively accepting dishonesty from those who shape and define the universe in which they live. That’s because lying has become so institutionalized in the United States that society is now largely desensitized to it.

Meet the usual suspects:

Television routinely tells lies--white ones, pastel ones and darker ones, falsely advertising, falsely promoting and falsely reporting.

Politicians routinely tell lies. Presidents tell lies, some for purely self-serving reasons, others as regrettable means to ends they feel will best serve the nation. It’s now widely apparent that Bill Clinton told lies while campaigning for the White House. Even if his economic plan ultimately succeeds, it won’t change the fact that his path to the presidency was strewn with fibs: No middle-class tax hikes, no closed doors to Haitians, etc.

Has truth become a casualty of life in the ‘90s? And do Americans believe that ends justify means?

For one answer, we switch channels now to “Jane Pratt,” a ditsy new talk show for teen- and twentysomethings at 5 p.m. weekdays on cable’s Lifetime network. Well, not always so ditsy.

Today’s premiere is about college cheating.

It’s a topic that Pratt--the 30-year-old editor-in-chief of Sassy magazine and editorial director for Dirt magazine--approaches with the guileless awe of someone hearing for the first time that some people file fraudulent tax returns.

That cheating occurs in schools at all levels will come as no surprise, of course, to anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes in a classroom. Yet give this obscure little show its due.

There on the screen today is a panel of acknowledged collegiate cheaters and whistle blowers, along with an audience of collegiate hooters. Together they comprise what may be a microcosm of U.S. thinking when it comes to cutting ethical corners.

A former cheater, maybe 24 or 25, justifies his actions. “Why not? It got me through. I have my degree.” The musty “M” word-- morality --is never uttered in an ensuing dialogue that finds the audience overwhelmingly pro-cheating. Meanwhile, a girl who turned in classmates for cheating on their SATs--saying she couldn’t have lived with herself otherwise--is roundly ridiculed as if she had violated some kind of Mafia oath. Because Pratt is so refreshingly unpretentious and spontaneous--and doesn’t lecture--she’s a good choice to communicate with young people. Yet at no time does she seek to elevate the dialogue above an intellectual monotone or to raise questions that challenge members of her panel or studio audience to expand their thinking. How would they differentiate cheating from other forms of dishonesty? As parents, what would they tell their kids about cheating? Is cheating an extension of a grades-over-learning emphasis in education?

Based on other preview episodes of “Jane Pratt,” the premiere may be a shiny hood ornament for a jalopy. A subsequent episode about condoms is only moderately smart, and another about “lunatic fans” is completely inane, never getting around to those who physically threaten celebrities. Jane to David Cassidy: “There must be a good side too. What about the girls and stuff?”

Today’s episode about cheating may be where Jane’s good stuff ends.

UFO: Last week’s CBS movie “A Family of Strangers” was a stranger to Jerry Hulse, the man on whose nonfiction book, “Jody,” the drama was based.

“I was devastated,” said Hulse, a former Times travel editor. “I think it was dishonest to give the impression this was a true story.”

Written 16 years ago, “Jody” detailed Hulse’s search for the birth parents of his gravely ill wife, whose only chance for long-term survival was delicate brain surgery. Before operating, however, doctors needed to know Jody’s complete family medical history.

But she had been adopted and didn’t know the identities of her birth parents. With only nine days until Jody’s scheduled operation, it was up to Hulse to unravel the family mystery that might help save his wife’s life.

In the movie, Jody (renamed Julie, and played by Melissa Gilbert) was estranged from her husband and had to do her own sleuthing. She finally located her birth mother (played by Patty Duke) in Canada (in reality it was Indiana), learning that her birth resulted from the rape of her mother by an unidentified teen-ager after the senior prom. The real Jody’s mother was raped by an adult man she knew from a neighboring farm.

After the father was ultimately identified in the movie, Julie had her operation and the story ended happily. As did the book.

But the rape that Hulse covered in two paragraphs in his book was made into a surreal movie sequence that was repeated again and again. “I had told them (the producers) that the one thing I insisted on was that the rape be handled sensitively, and they assured me the rape would be a very minor thing,” Hulse said. “But when I saw it, I was humiliated and Jody was hurt.”

As they say, however, sell your rights, sell your soul.