There is a great moment in the Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back by D.A. Pennebaker where Dylan is engaged with an established Time magazine writer. The writer is trying to uncover the Dylan mystique that is intangible, a sort of generation gap personified.
After a series of annoying questions, Bob fires back [paraphrasing], "you don't want the truth, magazines like Time would never dare print the truth, if you printed the truth you'd go out of business the next day".
While that particular exchange was based around a broader "what is truth", Dylan's words always stuck with me. Printing the truth is not in the interest of our culture, we always need the spin to make it palatable. I understand that. I wish it were different. The truth is a powerful thing. It has to be taken in doses.
I'm not saying I know what truth is, I'm biased. So take a current story. Maybe someone like Scott McClellan is telling the truth when he airs all the dirt on his years working for Bush. The truth about how Bush is inept or how he mislead the country is too hard to handle, but "disgruntled", "traitor" and "not the Scotty we knew" are easy tags we can throw at McClellan. These will make the news cycles. A good gauge is always how hard they attack the messenger and not the message. How many segments will be about why McClellan said what he said versus what he actually said? Who will show the lessons Scott learned from the Bush mindset that made a lot of really bad choices. The truth of his statements are not the issue. I hope the MSM can prove me wrong this time. Seeing how a passive media got us into this mess, I'm not counting on them to get us out of it.
Thinking back on that exchange in 1965 with Dylan and Time, truth was too hard to print. I hope the times they are-a changin'.
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