The Media and the Assassination
by Lisa Pease
In the popular 1998 movie The Truman Show (starring Jim Carrey and directed by Peter Weir), a character named Christof created a huge, fully contained bubble environment in which the title character Truman Burbank has been raised since birth. Truman doesn't know it, but Christof has been broadcasting every moment of Truman's life to the world on television by means of thousands of hidden cameras. Truman's only knowledge of the world comes from the one Christof has built for him, and as Christof so succinctly put it, "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented." When Truman attempts to leave his hometown to see the rest of the world, he notices that the place he has lived in all his life presents him with strange obstacles to his escape and irrational coincidences. Truman's faith in his world serves to imprison him for most of the film. But when he finally comes to believe that the truth is other than what he has been presented with, Truman's mental freedom enables him to achieve physical freedom.
How many of us realize that, to some degree, we also live in a world that is not wholly as it appears? And like Truman's world, the barriers to our discovering the reality of that which goes on around us are not so much physical as psychological. The media presents to us a version of the world that does not tell the full story, and as Benjamin Franklin once said, "Half the truth is often a great lie." If, as the famous biblical quotation engraved in the wall at CIA headquarters says, the truth will set us free, then what do lies do to us? Keep us imprisoned, like Truman, in a fictitious bubble where we are "protected" from the real world? The lesson of The Truman Show is especially relevant to those who wish to make sense of the media's reportage on the assassination of President Kennedy. The truth is out there and it is not hard to find, but we must seek it out for ourselves. As this article will show, it is unlikely that the truth will ever be given to us freely by the media.
One of the first questions people raise when confronted with evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is this: if any of the evidence for conspiracy is valid, why haven't the major media organizations told us? Wouldn't breaking the story about a conspiracy be a career-maker for an investigative reporter?
On the surface of it, the question appears to be legitimate. We assume that the purpose of the news media is to give us facts about newsworthy events to help us interpret life in our time. But is that a legitimate assumption?
Thomas Jefferson used to hold the opinion that the purpose of the media was to tell us the truth. His opinion changed radically once he knew more about the events being (mis)represented. Jefferson realized the importance of the press and the threat a less-than-honest press presents to a nation. In 1787, Jefferson said, "the basis of our government is the opinion of the people," and given choice between "a government without newspapers or newspapers without government," he would choose the latter. In 1799, having learned a bit more, he wrote, "Our citizens may be deceived for a while and have been deceived; but as long as the press can be protected, we may trust to them for light." But by 1807, the veil of idealism had completely fallen from Jefferson's eyes:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself ? becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior ... but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors ...
Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some way such as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; third, Possibilities; fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.'
One might be tempted to dismiss Jefferson's comments as overly cynical and not applicable to our time. But our situation is very similar. Today, most people get their news from television. A 1992 study conducted by the Center for the Study of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that people who watched a lot of TV news had more incorrect answers regarding facts of the day than those who watched very little TV news.
