One Saturday night, I saw "Capote" at the Cable Car Cinema. Though the film's subject is dark, I was optimistic as I left. On the walk back and in the hours since, I pondered the power of the non-fiction writer to tell truth in a way that is beautiful or entertaining, to realize the Keatsian thesis that beauty and truth are interwoven and mutually defined.
This theme is prevalent among "Capote's" rivals for this year's Best Picture Oscar. George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" directly elevates the journalist through his depiction in an artistic mode. Ours, then, must be a society that privileges truth.
Though examining the films that have captured the nation might tell us about what we find beautiful, it does not follow that it necessarily shows us what is true about our world. In fact, most popular films probably show us the opposite - the fantasies that we desire to see realized on the screen. Cinema most often threatens, or even nullifies, the idea of truth.
Perhaps more than with any generation before us, our culture encourages us to question everything. Enlightenment thinkers assumed that absolute truth was available to the reasoned mind. Today, we are cynically convinced that such truth is unattainable and, therefore, prize controversy instead. Without a professional field for truth, there is no counterweight to the misinformation, deliberate or accidental, that begets violence. The violent reaction to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons resulted from a fetishization of controversy. The prolonging of the crisis through media coverage of the reactions to the cartoons only perpetuates the cycle of controversy.
We no longer live in the age of the trusted TV news anchor. The Cronkites, Rathers, Jenningses and Brokaws have retired from service, and those who have replaced them do not hold the same cultural authority.
We encourage our journalists to be radicals, to be inflammatory - we prefer the theater of "Crossfire" or "The O'Reilly Factor" to information. Stephen Colbert ironically boasts that he provides "truthiness," blanket statements that have the semblance of certainty, that feel like truth without being true. And "truthiness," with its sound-byte catchiness, outsells truth by miles. There is a reason the New York Times can charge online for Thomas Friedman's or Maureen Dowd's diatribes but not for the paper's arguably superior news analysis.
An institution that should be the bulwark against governmental lie-mongering or ideological distortion has become both victims and confederates of these forces. Journalists who venture into the more dangerous reporting zones become victims of warring powers, kidnapped, killed and tortured as symbols of their states. Those who stay home and try to tell the truth without allowing their sources to become part of public political dialogue find themselves jailed. Why then, should they not turn to fiction, when there does not seem to be a market for truth?
Our culture has ceased to believe in truth except, paradoxically, in fiction. Today's journalists, who travel, research and look for broad trends underlying events, cannot, or perhaps no longer try to, think above national or ideological loyalties to reveal possibilities for common ground among peoples. If they cannot think in cosmopolitan terms, who else will?
Granted, the search for truth will always be ideological, determined by choices about what knowledge needs to be communicated and to whom. Superficial objectivity, the "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" approach sometimes adopted to avoid the charge of bias is as unproductive as bias itself. Instead, what I hope for is a commitment to both factual accuracy and ideological skepticism, a dogged tenacity in our search for truth.
Political leaders can make policy, writers and entertainers of all types can communicate, intellectuals of many molds can analyze and make connections. Journalists are a rare and essential component of society because they can, and must, do all of these things. The best ones can understand and interpret the world from multiple and often competing perspectives without losing the ability to discern the merits and failings of each view. They can communicate these findings and the possibilities for moving society forward to audiences in meaningful ways, and, if they do so consistently enough to earn our trust, they can in fact make changes.
The problem today is that journalists and audiences no longer see this last possibility. Yet there have been moments when the media has radically altered the political course in positive ways. New York's Boss Tweed was brought down by a cartoonist, and Joseph McCarthy by a nightly news anchor.
Columns like this one can admittedly be critiqued as more rhetoric than content; it is, after all, an "opinions" page. But I ask readers to hold us to a higher standard. Scrutinize the writings of Brown's columnists and write us letters in response. Though we are given license for ideology, demand from us the backing of truth. You will be helping to breed the new world order, which is, after all, what college is meant to prepare us for.
Maha Atal '08 doesn't "read books."
