Truth today

By Teresa R. Tunay, OCDS

(The author writes the column, "And that's the truth", in The CBCP Monitor, the official newspaper of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines).

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers!” seems an odd piece of advice coming from a media person, but that is exactly what I say whenever I’m asked to give media education seminars anywhere, anytime.

My audiences include students, professionals, seminarians, workers (from janitors to managers), cloistered nuns, parishioners, etc., but the two segments that I try to handle with extra care are the students and the cloistered nuns. The students—because they are young, idealistic and impressionable; and the nuns—because they have very limited contact with the outside world they are called upon to pray for. I base my observations on the questions they ask, the comments they make, their reactions to stimulus during our interaction.

Students would by their very youth tend to be naïve and unconcerned and yet, upon peer pressure, would “take a stand” on issues, parroting arguments and wisecracks picked up in media. “Taking a stand” and sounding knowledgeable give students the veneer of sophistication they sincerely think impresses others.

By their very calling, cloistered nuns are allowed only very little exposure to media, and yet, a number of them would sincerely take sides on any current political issue, emboldened by the information ingested as truth from people who come to them to ask for prayers.

Innocent and trusting, both young people and sheltered women of God could be in danger of being misled and used by unscrupulous entities with hidden agenda. These entities could take advantage of the students’ idealism, and use the latter as pawns in their power games by feeding them with “the truth” and spurring them into action outside of the school’s walls. These unscrupulous entities could also use their friendship with the nuns to lend credibility to their cause and shield their selfish intentions from public scrutiny—for, indeed, who would question the petitions of these guileless, prayerful women?

The thing is—the students and the cloistered nuns are not that aware of the fact that media agencies are there primarily for business, and that media’s zeal in exposing the truth could be powered by vested interests. They are not in a position to know the inside story, nor are they trained to read between the lines. More often than not, they are swayed by what they read in the papers.

What is more saddening to note is that people in general seem to have become less and less conscientious in seeking the truth; we do not want to bother, to investigate, to dig into the motives beneath the truth being told—or sold—by media. We simply lap it up. Advertisers use appealing visuals and their brand of truth to lure consumers into buying their stuff. Reporters chasing after scoops could file stories filled with half-truths—sensational and saleable half-truths. Columnists and radio-tv commentators could pontificate about the truth when in fact they are merely being truthy—because truthiness lends them an air of authority and omniscience.

“Truthy” and “truthiness” are relatively new words coined by our times, and both appear in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with “truthiness” being defined as a derivative of “truthy” which OED first came up with in 1800. “Truthiness”, popularized by American comedian Stephen Colbert, was even honored as “Word of the Year” in 2006 by Merriam Webster Dictionary which gives it two definitions: “truth that comes from the guts, not books” and “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true.” In the same year, Canadian Parliamentarian Ken Dryden in a speech delivered in the House of Commons captured the meaning of “truthiness” when he defined it as “something that is spoken as if true that one wants others to believe is true, that said often enough with enough voices orchestrated behind it might even sound true, but is not true.”

It is with such truthiness that we are daily being bombarded by media—celebrities’ amorous or amorphous philosophies; politicians’ peculiar perspectives; half-baked activists’ platitudes; rebellious bloggers’ devil-may-care assertions; literary best-sellers’ pronouncements and popular entertainers’ endorsements. Everyone has his or her own brand of “truth” to peddle, media agents continue to rake in the profits, while fence sitters—apparently stunned by overpowering “truths”—are unwittingly dragged into the descent toward moral incoherence.

That is the sad fact about truth today. It is being reduced by media to truthism. Worse, they are elevating truthism to the level of truth.

Nowadays, anyone with media access can manipulate facts and espouse the concepts he sees or wishes to be true until he gets others to believe it as truth. When truth today is simply a press release from Malacanang, what a pregnant actress utters with conviction about her ex-lover actor, the viewpoint a Senator or a Congressman states with a clenched fist, or the venom godless militants sputter about bishops who would rather keep silent—and no one questions the loud, the self-righteous and the shameless—we all suffer. The truth as revealed in, by, and through Jesus Christ gets buried under an avalanche of half-truths and relativism.

The power of media is almost immeasurable. The power of misused media is devastating. We only have to open our eyes to its influence on our little children and we will see how far-reaching its harmful effects can be on society. What other institution can stand up to media and annihilate the insidious evil therein? The government? The military? The schools? No, but the Church can—because the Church is in government, in military, in education, everywhere, and it is the body of Christ. Are we doing enough—enough—to use media to make the immutable, absolute and discoverable Truth overpower the truthism in our midst? Yes? Or No? Indeed, the truth(ism) hurts. And that’s the truth.