Shattering the Façade: Why Truth Is Indispensable to Virtue
Exposing lies, finding truth, and why it's crucial to know the difference. Motivation Monday #5
Trust in the media has cratered over the last couple of years, and for good reason. While the history of the problem goes back further than Fox news’s shakeup of the industry, at the root is a twisted treatment of truth.
Pre-Fox, most Americans grew up with a cultural assumption that journalists held a high regard for objective truth. We imbibed it in stories of hard-boiled, honest journalists, and characters of unquestionable honesty like Clark Kent. This fostered an equally unquestioned feeling that we could trust the news arriving in print and over the airways. Fox News started the polarization in the news, simply because they claimed to tell both sides. That simple shift in presentation dented the viewpoint monopoly in the news industry.
By 2011, at least in my awareness, their competition had solidified a distrust of Fox among legacy news viewers. It would only grow into the current mudslinging among news organizations. The harsher the accusations of propagandizing grew, the more the average American began to lose trust in their information feed. They created the rift that broke the perception of reliability.
A mist of trust still lingers deep in our popular thought—though I believe it’s clearing for more of our countrymen with every news cycle. Over the past four years, I think a majority of us had a moment when the façade cracked, and we caught a peek through The Narrative™ coming through the legacy channels.
For me, the veneer of objectivity bubbled and peeled back under the blazing sun of September 12, 2009. My wife and I had a weekend trip planned to Reno, but the growing conservative movement known as the Tea Party had hooked my curiosity. Organizers planned a march in Washington, D.C., and at state capitols and city halls around the nation. It was the first mass protest movement by conservatives in my lifetime. We were both curious, so we decided to attend the rally at Nevada’s capitol building as part of our getaway.
Hundreds of people filled the green lawns around the capitol building. I’m tempted to say thousands, but I’m confident there were over 500 based on my experience in churches up to that number. You can see how large the space is here. They came from all walks of life, from polo-clad professionals to leather-vested bikers. The age range was broad as well, although I was on the younger end at twenty-eight.
Some folks waved signs on the corner, but most milled around, talked to others, or listened to several speakers scattered around the area. Cars honked as they passed by, and every restaurant on the street was packed. Music filled the air. A group of reenactors walked around reciting historic speeches in colonial costumes, as if we were visiting Mount Vernon or Independence Hall. Folks were smiling and hopeful. An artist had brought a large sculpture in progress that was his metal representation of American freedom. I felt like I was at a county fair, not a protest.
I tell you all this to set up the moment my trust in the news cracked. Although for me, it immediately shattered.
That evening, knowing that these types of events were planned across the country, my wife and I went back to our hotel room and turned on the news. When a commercial came on, we switched channels to compare the coverage. The Tea Party rally was the primary story on all the cable networks.
Fox presented shots of large crowds in several cities while the anchors reported a story that made sense for the visuals. It also matched up with my experience. They talked about the rant on CNBC from Rick Santelli that instigated the movement for context. Then the pundits talked about their opinions on the movement and whether the Tea Party complaints were clear and valid.
Flip over to CNN or MSNBC, and the tone was completely different. They showed little footage of the rallies, using closeups of shoes walking by the camera, or a couple of people with signs, rather than showing a wide shot of the crowds. The visuals weren’t “wrong,” they just didn’t show much.
The reporting was another matter. They didn’t talk about the facts of the event or explain what was happening. They didn’t give context. These media elites mocked and ridiculed fellow Americans without mercy. Even the “news” segment dripped with condescension and mischaracterization about the event and the people attending. The Tea Party folks weren’t upset about spending and government bailouts, they were racists who opposed President Obama.
It got worse when the pundits jumped in. They used the disgusting sexual reference ‘teabaggers’ on day one—on live TV (hello, FCC!), which immediately became the primary slur against conservatives on still-nascent Facebook and other online forums. It was obvious they had already made up their minds about this movement and only wanted to mock and disparage it into oblivion. I had a tightness in my stomach, uncertain how important this one-off bad reporting was.
My jaw hit the floor when we switched to the local channel. Instead of the crowd filling the lawn around the capitol building, the local reporters showed a handful of people standing on a corner with signs. The camera pointed away from the main crowd, toward a nearly empty street, likely early in the morning before most people showed up.
I texted a few friends who had attended similar rallies back home. They told me of similar crowds, and similar local reporting.
I’d spent years working at my college newspaper and considered going into the news business. I had a decent respect for the process, though I knew there was natural bias on both sides. This moment blew up my whole perception of reality and news. After that, I saw the manipulation of our information everywhere…
How a subtly emotive word imperceptibly shapes your reaction on a story.
How a shift in camera angle reveals or hides reality.
But most of all, how the vast majority of “news” programming intends to create The Narrative™ in your mind, not to keep you informed and educated as a rational citizen.
My wife and I both had this experience confirmed by comparing other events we happened to be at with how the media reported it. We told as many friends as possible about the experience. Anybody who watched primarily legacy channels wouldn’t hear it. They just kept warning us not to watch Fox—even though we continued to compare news outlets to try and seek the truth.
Elon Musk’s retweet of the cartoon about the Left leaving him behind was a reality for us over the next few years, except we were the conservatives that didn’t move, while our friends dashed left.
Moderate friends who watched only legacy media slowly shifted their morals to accept every leftist policy and cultural position as if they had invisible hooks lodged in their noses. It didn’t matter if they were Christians or not. When The Narrative™ dictated a new moral position, they rallied, and virtue signaled.
By the time of the “mostly peaceful protests” of 2020, there was no convincing them of anything other than the new orthodoxy. Gay marriage, BLM, transgender rights, immigration, and abortion became their new expressions of morality. The Biblical witness didn’t matter. Scientific facts became misinformation if you weren’t a qualified and approved expert. Common sense was a clanging cymbal.
I share this lengthy story as background for a conversation about truth as a virtue.
Courage is often called the essential virtue, or the mother of all others, since, as the theory goes, every virtue requires courage for its expression. We are weak creatures who would rather not behave virtuously, and so the virtues test our resolve constantly.
In a previous article, I argued that love is the determiner that allows courage any claim to virtue. Now, I’d like to argue for the integral role that truth plays in all virtues.
Absent truth, any virtue can be turned toward destructive ends. This is why the media’s determination to twist reality into The Narrative™ in a way that benefits their political preferences is so villainous.
Even though we’re all born with a predilection to sin, there is still a necessary desire to believe we’re usually doing good—else we drift toward madness. We prefer to think of ourselves as good people, which means most of us want to do the things we see as good, even imperfectly.
When we trust a lie about what is good or what is real, our desire to do good is easily co-opted for wickedness.
To avoid the cloud of emotions around the hot button issues, let’s think through a hypothetical.
Imagine you come across two men fighting on the sidewalk. One clearly has the upper hand as they grapple on the ground. The man on top has the other in a submission hold that could injure the guy beneath him.
A woman runs to you, pleading for help. She says the guy winning the fight attacked her boyfriend out of nowhere.
In your noble desire to help an innocent victim of a vicious assault, you launch a surprise blitz on the attacker and knock him senseless. The victim and his girl thank you and make their escape.
A moment later, another man comes around the corner with a drawn pistol. He sees you standing over the unconscious man and orders you to the ground. After he cuffs you, you discover that you assaulted a plainclothes police officer trying to arrest a violent gang member who just murdered someone.
Because you believed the woman’s lie, your chivalrous intervention supported evil and thwarted justice.
When it comes to virtue, it’s not the thought that counts—despite what some of my previously mentioned friends now believe.
Extrapolate that example to any of today’s culture war issues and you’ll see the coordinated assault on reality and truth by academia and media over the past few decades. The road to our current confusions and conflicts is obvious in hindsight. For instance, if you can convince people that a baby in the earliest stages of development isn’t really human, then abortion doesn’t look like murder. It can be recast as compassion for a woman overwhelmed and unprepared for being a mother. It’s challenging to overcome that emotional barrier to the truth.
If we evaluated all the cultural issues folks argue most about, my bet is that compassion is probably the easiest virtue to twist toward evil ends. All you must do is make the right person look like the victim, and voila, folks who dislike injustice are on your side. The easiest way to incentivize them to ignore contradictory information is to cast everyone who disagrees as hateful bigots—until you push too far.
The ruse is now obvious to the majority of folks—a fact I think is indisputable based on the latest election.
The trouble for me and you remains: How do you find truth in a world full of deceptions?
How do you act morally in a sea of unreliable perceptions and narratives? That is, how do you avoid being duped into supporting immoral causes?
If you’ve been reading my stuff so far, you can probably guess that I’m going to suggest the Bible. In this case, it has answers to both problems.
On a meta scale, the Bible helps us understand what is real and what is really good. God engineered the world with a set of rules. This is the whole basis of scientific inquiry.
If we walk according to those rules, it tends to lead toward human flourishing. Some things are simply verboten, but we have a lot of freedom in the gaps. When your read the Bible, you discover what types of behavior are good and beautiful, and which are divergent and ugly. Once you know that, you’re a good way toward recognizing when a storyteller (e.g. news anchor) is trying to manipulate you into accepting, celebrating, or promoting evil.
Of course, knowing the Savior whom the Bible reveals helps it all make sense. Knowing the true love of the Creator also allows us the chance to accept the realities that we don’t like.
But as the story of my Christian friends who fell for the propaganda confirms, this is not an absolute guarantee against being fooled for a time.
The Bible addresses discovering the truth in human affairs as well. Proverbs 18:17 gives us the following wisdom as guidance: “The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him.”
If we read that in the Bible and then only listen to one report, we’re fools.
When you’re consuming news, don’t rely on one source or one side. Especially for outrageous stories, look for multiple sources for corroboration. Hear what both sides are saying. Where possible, find the original source of quotes and clips—whether in print, audio, or video. At a minimum, this allows you to hear a clip in context and recognize when the reporters may be distorting the truth for their own narrative. Try to approach the original with an open mind, so that you aren’t distorting what’s said with your own preconceptions.
I’ve heard of a couple of news apps that supposedly show you both sides and track the potential bias or blind spots, like Ground News. But I haven’t investigated them yet to make my own determination of how reliable that bias rating is. This might make it easier, but the responsibility for finding the truth still relies on you.
This next bit is key. Evaluate what’s said in light of a broader truth. Is this story leading toward virtue and moral action, or toward envy, greed, or false compassion? Are they promoting what God says is true and good, or what humans have substituted for “good.”
All this takes extra effort. But it’s worth it knowing you aren’t being mindlessly manipulated. There’s an ease and freedom there that I can only tell you is worth it from experience.
When you know the truth, it indeed sets you free.
Do you have your own story of when the façade of media neutrality broke? Share it below.
Updates:
If you haven’t heard, I’m writing a new series of kids’ books to pass on classic virtues and give you more wholesome stuff to read to your kids.
Courage happens to be the theme of the first book. And in it, one of the dogs learns how to get back up after a fall.
If you’re curious about a series that promotes virtues for kids through fun, adventurous stories, then please sign up here to be notified when the Kickstarter is ready. We’re aiming for the campaign launch after the holiday rush.
It’s a collaborative project with my daughter, so we’re using a pen name. She can’t wait to see it become real. I hope you’ll join the campaign and help spread the virtues that created (and can restore) our culture.
I’ll be posting more updates under my articles as the book and campaign take shape.
In addition to Imago Dad, Brandon Wilborn writes fantasy with spiritual themes. His current project is a series for young readers about a dog with an imagination that highlights the classic virtues of our Judeo-Christian heritage. But he’s already got a couple of fantasy books and stories available at BrandonWilborn.com
The so called "refugee crisis" in 2015 and the related incidents at New Years Eve in Cologne opened the curtain of propaganda for me. Once you looked behind it there is no way back.
It is very easy to conflate truth and fact. It is essential in sense making to understand the difference between the two.
In a simple binary fact is the objective reality and truth is the subjective reality. Facts exist regardless of our existence, truth is our experience of those facts.
This comes into sharp relief with optical illusions. Their factual existence doesn’t seem true because of the mechanics of our perception.
In terms of the television coverage of the tea party events, both channels showed footage which was a representation of fact. Both channels coverage registered as true for both audiences. One channel more accurately captured the facts.
I think that we can see from this perspective that Trump was the most truthful candidate, he has no filter and always talks from his experience. He is less truthful with a teleprompter. I think we also know that his connection to the world of facts is a little looser than most. You don’t get a sense that he is a reader or that he spends time wrestling with exactly these sort of things. Incurious in the way that someone with his sense of drive and purpose usually is.
If we agree here, we can move on to why selecting a single source for truth can be dangerous. In this case, the bible. Is it ok to say that there aren’t a lot of facts in bible? Sure, there are a lot broadly factual events and references that place it in a historical context, but in terms of how we understand the world to be now, light on details.
The bible is a work of sense-making, of placing ourselves in the context of a wider world that outlines a single person’s place in it. It does a pretty good job, it’s fairly coherent in parts (weird that there’s two parts, that god wouldn’t have got it right the first time and needed a patch, but perhaps I’m revealing to much of my own bias here) and at the same time very broad. It’s this broadness that provides a challenge to our sensing of truth.
We know that the early church was loose with property and possessions, humble with displays of holiness, generous of spirit to other faiths - just as Jesus was. While this way of life held a lot of truth for the people that practiced it, it did not for the people who used it for people who wanted to wield power. There are warnings against this that are largely ignored now.
The interpretation of biblical text is now more of an expression of ethos than it is divine will.
Using a single source of sense-making is vulnerable to having it co-opted by power.
We can see this throughout history as the powerful have ridden on a public wave of ‘truth’ to either take or consolidate their power.
It happened during the crusades so the church could fill its coffers. It happened in the age of exploration so that that kings and queens could do the same. It’s happening now.
Yes, a wider, wiser consumption of media is needed, I completely agree, but also wider, wiser sources of sense-making. There are so many books of wisdom out there, it seems foolish to not test the usefulness of them all.