Why Let Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story?
Imagine Sidney Blumenthal’s surprise when he sat down at his computer in August, logged on to the Drudge Report, a popular Internet gossip column, and discovered he “has a spousal-abuse past that has been effectively covered up.” As Blumenthal, political journalist and newly appointed presidential assistant, told it through his attorney, this was news to him and to his wife, who directs the White House fellows program. They responded by slapping a $30-million libel suit on Matt Drudge, who writes the Drudge Report, and on America OnLine, the Internet service that carries it. Meanwhile, Drudge, admitting he had been snookered by his source, pulled the item and issued a retraction.
In the traditional press, Drudge’s transgression has occasioned yet another examination of the murky world of journalistic ethics, this time with the added wrinkle of trying to assess whether an Internet provider is a publisher in the legal sense and whether libel laws apply to the web. But the real story here has little to do with ethics or libel law. The real story is about the diminishing value of truth in contemporary America.
Drudge, a cocksure, 30-year-old former gift-shop employee, who began his Internet career by rummaging through CBS’s garbage and posting the choicest tidbits on the web, rejects the title journalist. Rather he fancies himself a modern Walter Winchell, the great gossip-mongering newspaper columnist and broadcaster, right down to the Winchellian snap-brim fedora Drudge often sports.
Winchell did call himself a journalist and prided himself on his reportorial sense, but in comparing himself to Winchell, Drudge means he is an iconoclast and a guerrilla just as Winchell was. If the mainstream press hates him because he won’t play by their rules, so much the better. They hated Winchell, too.
Of course, one of those rules is accuracy. Winchell seldom checked the accuracy of what he wrote and neither, apparently, does Drudge, though in Winchell’s case, it wasn’t entirely a matter of carelessness or shoddy ethics. Winchell knew a source who gave him what he called a “wrongo” would wind up on his “Drop Dead List,” meaning the poor fellow, usually a press agent, wouldn’t get anything in the column for months. For someone who made his living getting clients’ names in columns, this amounted to professional suicide.
Still, in insisting on the accuracy of his column, Winchell was a bit disingenuous. He understood that the truthfulness of the items he ran was always beside the point, except to the journalistic police who loved to nail him for an error. For most readers, the value of the information he ran--who was romancing whom, who was getting divorced, who was pregnant, who was in financial hot water--lay not in its truthfulness but in its salaciousness and in the sense of privilege it gave readers in being “in the know.
As with Drudge’s report, Winchell’s column was about telling people what was going to happen before it actually happened. But by the time the prediction had or had not come to pass, dozens more items had come down the pike, and virtually everyone but the subjects had forgotten what it was Winchell had said. That was the beauty of it. You could say anything, because veracity didn’t matter. Only entertainment value did.
In a sense, what Winchell created and now Drudge has picked up is a journalistic version of E.L. Doctorow’s novel “Ragtime.” Just as Doctorow deployed real historical figures in fictional encounters, the gossips can deploy real celebrities and agencies in their fictions, or, rather, in their “unconfirmed’ reports. You want to imagine President Bill Clinton in some sexually compromising position? Go right ahead. You think Clinton literally pulled the trigger on Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr.? Be my guest. No one is stopping you. If it makes a good story, which is to say an entertaining story, just do it.
In a way, this is what semiologists have been saying all along. These people, linguistic anthropologists who study our culture as if it were a set of agreed-upon signs, speak of everything in our lives as a collaboration. We all have come to agree what a word means, what a red light means when we are driving, what a certain facial expression means. That much is obvious. But when everything we do or see is a construction of our own devising, there is no such thing as a truth or an objectivity that lays outside our collaboration. If we essentially make everything up, there is only subjectivity.
This sort of thinking can get you into trouble, as a scientist proved last year when he wrote a tongue-in-cheek article denying all scientific principles as shared fabrications and wound up getting it published in some semiological journal. But if their theory seems ludicrous in terms of physical reality, the semiologists nonetheless seem to have a pretty good description of how things now seem to operate in our cultural reality. In a world where the purpose of news is no longer to provide knowledge but to provide excitement, verifiable facts don’t seem to mean as much as they once did. Did Blumenthal beat his wife? Drudge had said yes, the Blumenthals no, but even though it didn’t happen in physical reality, all that mattered for many readers is whether it happened in their collective imagination.
Once upon a time, this sort of thing was confined to gossips like Winchell and Drudge. Now it has gone mainstream. Kitty Kelly’s recent biography of the House of Windsor is full of titillating tall tales. She even accuses the Queen Mother of having been artificially inseminated. When an interviewer asked her where she got this particular fact, Kelly answered that it was well-known that King George VI’s brother, the Duke of Windsor, was impotent, so one knew it ran in the family! In short, she sort of made it up.
Similarly, investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh’s upcoming tome on the dark side of the Kennedys was to be rich with the most unbecoming anecdotes, including the “fact” that President John F. Kennedy had been blackmailed by Marilyn Monroe after an affair. The evidence is a contract between Monroe and Kennedy, in which the president agrees to set up a trust fund for Monroe’s mother--a contract that has been thoroughly discredited. But, as recent reports reveal, Hersh seems unbowed by the challenge to his credibility, though he has not included the contested contract in his work. Maybe he realizes his own readers will never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Though publishing has succumbed, traditional journalists have usually been hamstrung in this kind of imaginative reporting because newspapers and TV news departments still purport to believe in an objective reality, and if they don’t, they know most jurors in libel actions do. As a result, mainstream journalists are stuck with the facts, no matter how much they may spin them. But the Internet, where Drudge holds forth, operates under no such restrictions and seems rather proud of it.
The Internet is such a huge receptacle of rumor, half-truth, misinformation and disinformation that the very idea of objective truth perishes in the avalanche. All you need to create a “fact” in the web world is a bulletin board or chat room. Gullible cybernuts do the rest. And so, in Internetland, Kurt Cobain lives, Kurt Vonnegut delivered a college commencement address on sun-tan lotion, Hillary Rodham Clinton is on the verge of being indicted, TWA Flight 800 was shot down by an errant Navy missile and the royals had a hand in the death of Princess Diana.
In fairness, the Internet didn’t invent kooks, conspiracy theorists or rumormongers, and their fantasies would have floated in the ether even without it. But the Internet not only provides a place for these half-truths and un-truths to be widely disseminated, it gives them a legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have.
Which may just make it the medium of our muddled factual future and may make Drudge a portent of things to come. Liberated from any obligation to truth, the Internet can retail whatever it likes in its endless quest to exploit our ever-growing prurient interest. In the process, it is creating a separate reality that threatens to usurp the reality of the mainstream news. When truth is no longer the standard of fact and entertainment is, anything goes. Whether this makes for good journalism, it will certainly make for some fascinating reports.
By the way, did you hear the Blumenthals are running a white slavery ring of young Republicans from the White House basement? I read it on the Internet.*