It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war, but I believe the same could be said about truth and greed. When one is intent upon accumulating vast quantities of wealth and power, the first thing dispensed with as useless is truth. What politician would risk defeat by telling the truth? What manufacturer would risk loss of sales by telling the truth? What crook would risk incarceration by telling the truth? Very, very few, if any.
But how are we to know who to trust if there is no source of reliably truthful information? It used to be that we thought we could trust the mainstream media, i.e., the local newspapers and the nightly news with Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and others. But there came a time, around the 80s, when the so-called news consultants stepped in and showed the station owners how they could increase their profit levels — emphasize entertainment and don’t worry about unprofitable stuff like truth and facts.
Today the national media corporations are no more interested in truthfulness than Hollywood is. They have two basic criteria for their news programming: one, is it entertaining, such as a celebrity scandal, and two, will it offend any sponsors, such as too-truthful coverage of a massive corporate environmental disaster. In other words, they are only as truthful as they feel they can afford to be. They, like all for-profit corporations, are in business solely to maximize profits at the expense of all else.
Now you’ve got cable news media that not only hide the truth, they actually fabricate facts and events in order to further a political agenda — such as the “fair and balanced” news of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes of the Fox network. There are a number of agenda cable news networks out there now that purport to have the “real facts” while framing their programming so that consumers are left with a specific version of events.
Many of these distortions are basically lies of commission like the network news telling us that the war in Iraq was justified and necessary. There are also lies of omission whereby facts and events that consumers should know and hear about are buried and not shown the light of day. For instance, during the second Bush administration, the news media told America about President Bush’s travels to Saudi Arabia for the token reason of pleading with the Saudis to release more oil and thus bring the price of our gasoline down. What they purposely omitted was the agreement that was worked out by Bush and the Saudis to buy a “civilian” nuclear program from us — lock, stock, and plutonium. That actually happened but you never heard about it, did you? Still havent’ have you? And there are thousands of stories, great and small, that you never heard and never will hear. Lies of omission can be just as treacherous as lies of commission.
The point is, consumers today have no one that they can trust to reliably give them truthful information on a regular basis. And without that truthful information, consumers are at the mercy of merciless corporations — corporations who are intent upon concentrating all the wealth and power in this country into their hands. And they are succeeding at an alarming rate, while destroying every vestige of our civilization in the process. Food corporations are destroying our health; fossil fuel corporations are destroying our environment; financial corporations are destroying our economy; manufacturing corporations are destroying our unions; munitions corporations are destroying our security; hired corporate stooges in Washington are destroying our entitlement programs; hired corporate stooges on the Supreme Court are destroying our democracy; and the list goes on.
Unless we band together and come up with a method of getting reliably truthful information, we will never be able to turn this situation around. And if we fail to turn it around, we will collapse into a failed state and become just another poverty-stricken, third-world country.
That is what we at MajorityVoteRules.Org intend to do: help develop that method of getting reliably truthful information. Our first suggestion is to bring some facts and truthfulness to the political process. Truth in politics? Sounds like an oxymoron if ever there was one, doesn’t it? But there’s a simple thing we could do: instead of having the candidates disclaimer at the end of their political television ad that says, “my name is Senator Stooge and I endorsed this commercial,” which means absolutely nothing, we could require that it says, “this commercial was fact-checked by Politifact.org and found to be fundamentally accurate.” Think of the impact of that: if they had to follow that mandate, they couldn’t run any of the commercials that they have all run in the past. And wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?
And that’s just one suggestion: we have more that we’ll share in the months to come. But we can’t do anything with our suggestions unless we get enough voters to stand with us and make the demands that need to be made. The corporations have the money and the lawyers for now, but we’ve got the numbers it takes to turn that situation around. We can get money and lawyers too, and we can pull our country out of the jaws of destruction if we really work at it.
We would like to start the return to truth in advertising/news/media/politics with the concept of fact-checked political advertising and we would like your suggestions and input as to how we can proceed. In the meantime, we are going to fill this page with the most truthful and factual information we can lay our hands on. And we would like you to contribute to that effort as well. We’re all going to have to become investigative reporters and share our stories with as many others as we can reach.
Maybe if the mainstream media starts losing enough readership and money they will acquiesce to our demand that they fulfill their obligation to their country and their consumers and provide the level of truthful information that is necessary for us to make adequately informed choices. Once thing is for sure: if we don’t make the demand for truth, they will never supply it. And without it, we have no democracy — we have a tyranny by a few — an oligarchy.
