You want answers?
I think I’m entitled to them.
You want answers?
I want the truth!
You can’t handle the truth!
Thanks to Ted Turner, I’ve seen A Few Good Men a few too many times. Still, that scene always sends a shiver down my spine. Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, pushing each other to the emotional brink. I may not like Tom Cruise, but for that brief moment I respect him. And in the end it’s hard to blame Jack too much. After all, the truth is hard to handle.
When’s the last time you told a lie? I’m not talking about big, life-altering lies. Just the small ones, like when you tell your friends how crazy last Friday was because you’d rather they didn’t know you were actually a) watching a movie alone, b) eating a whole pizza, or c) Collect-calling ex-girlfriends.
Lies come in all shapes and sizes. There are lies of omission, where someone withholds a piece of information to influence others. There are lies of self-deception, where people convince themselves that one thing is really another. And then there are lies of misinformation. Misinformation is a difficult thing to distinguish, largely because the people who spread it are frighteningly intelligent.
Just look at Bill O’Reilly. I know bashing the guy is only slightly more original than dressing up as Borat for Halloween. But maybe the part in all of us that sneers at his bull-headedness, and laughs when thinking about his prior sexual harassment settlement, is selling the guy short.
After all, O’Reilly’s résumé is nothing short of staggering. He has two master’s degrees – one in broadcast journalism from Boston University, the other in public administration from Harvard. His TV show, The O’Reilly Factor, is in its 12th year on the air. He writes a weekly column, which is syndicated nationwide. Although it’s tempting, calling him stupid just doesn’t stand up against the evidence.
So maybe he’s not the evil, calculating excuse for a human being he often gets depicted as. What’s the problem then? It lies in his pathological, egomaniacal self-assurance. The man simply cannot admit when he’s wrong – or that he’s ever wrong at all. The last time I checked, screwing up every now and then is a fact of life. And while being sure of yourself sometimes may mean you have conviction, being sure all the time just makes you ridiculously closed-minded.
As bad as O’Reilly may be, fellow Fox pundit Sean Hannity is far worse. Which, as logic would have it, explains why Hannity actually has two shows on the Fox News Network – Hannity and Colmes, and the aptly named Hannity’s America. The former features Hannity and his punching bag, Alan Colmes. They offer opposing political views on the day’s issues, and the show frequently features guests, who get to take turns with Hannity yelling at Colmes and calling him incompetent. One show offers plenty of time for someone to indoctrinate their viewers with propaganda. But two shows? I can’t believe that’s even legal.
No critique of television punditry is complete without dedicating at least one paragraph to CNN’s resident isolationist/xenophobe, Lou Dobbs. As much as I dislike him, and as much as I believe he’s a regressive influence on political discourse, there’s something undeniably hypnotic about the man. How he manages to muster up so much rage over the fact of illegal immigration, day in and day out, and not rupture a primary artery, astounds me.
While a cynical idea, it only makes sense that our leaders must sometimes lie to us. Depending on the circumstances, our national security may depend on it. But journalists aren’t in the public service field – it isn’t for them to decide what information we deserve to know. Only someone with an ego the size of O’Reilly, Hannity or Dobbs’ would believe otherwise.
When I think about the political issues of our day, a famous quote by Socrates always comes to mind. “As for me,” he once said, “all I know is that I know nothing.” How about giving him one of Hannity’s time slots?
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