It’s official. Fibbing is OK if it serves a higher purpose. Oprah said so.*
The queen of all media tossed this ethical grenade recently when she called CNN’s Larry King to defend his guest, James Frey, author of mega-best-seller A Million Little Pieces. Frey’s memoir of addiction and recovery was featured on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” when it was anointed the October selection of the world’s most powerful book club.
The champagne went flat in January when The Smoking Gun, a Web site devoted to investigative reporting, posted a damning story with the tantalizing tagline “The Man Who Conned Oprah.” What followed was an old-school piece of “gotcha!” journalism that showed how Frey had embellished and, in some cases, fabricated significant events in the account of his life. Frey admitted to King he had taken dramatic license but said he stood by “the essential truth” of his life. As King was about to sign off, Winfrey phoned to say the report outing Frey was “much ado about nothing.”
What mattered, Winfrey said, was that millions of people struggling with their own monkey-on-the-back habits had read Frey’s book and felt better. In a nation addicted to feeling good, she implied, swallowing a little pill of deception is a small price to pay.
Winfrey’s take on lying is not new — Machiavelli said it first when he wrote, “the end justifies the means,” the greatest rationalization for bad acts ever — and it appears plenty of Americans agree.
William Bastone, editor of The Smoking Gun, says that in the avalanche of comments about the Frey exposé, some 40 percent of people sent “how dare you” messages. They were furious at the reporters, not Frey.
Bastone and staff were stunned. “Where’s the outrage?” he says. It’s the same question he asked when Americans uttered a collective “Who cares?” after Martha Stewart was jailed for lying to federal prosecutors about whether she received a tip to dump her ImClone stock before it tanked. Once Stewart was freed from prison, she did not go into hiding; she made public appearances wearing her electronic ankle bracelet like a bauble from Cartier.
So when did public lying become a résumé booster rather than the end of a career? Many point to Watergate as the moment when the public’s confidence in the veracity of its high officials began its downward spiral.
Are we so used to being duped that over time, our outrage muscles have gone all slack and gooey? Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired Princeton University philosophy professor, says that’s as good a theory as any. As the author of a little treatise called “On Bull—,” he’s an expert on unmitigated claptrap. “We’re swimming in a sea of bull— and lies,” Frankfurt says. “There’s no way of avoiding it. The culture is built on it.”
Whatever the arena, lying has become routine. Everybody’s doing it. “We take it for granted and so it doesn’t excite us when we discover that it’s happened,” Frankfurt says. The country hasn’t lost its taste for the truth — “it just has sort of given up hoping for it.”
Smoking Gun’s Bastone waxes nostalgic for the period in American history when public figures caught fibbing did more than shrug and launch a reality TV show. “Nixon was a shunned man. He went into exile. No one goes in exile anymore.” Bastone says.
We get riled when we don’t expect to be lied to and believe the deception costs us something — say when we learn a trusted mechanic has bilked us out of $600 for an unnecessary brake job. It’s harder to work up a fire in the belly for the bigger lies — from corporate heads and elected officials — because we don’t always readily see the personal price of that deception.
And there’s another, more subtle psychology at play. As long as we aren’t the victims, we can’t help but admire a good grifter. Much of our leisure time of late is spent watching artful dodgers at work or working an angle ourselves. Celebrity poker matches are all the rage and online games are emptying the pockets of college students from coast to coast. “All of poker is based on how good your deception skills are,” says Caroline Keating, professor of psychology at Colgate University. “If you can convince us you have cards you don’t have, we’ll pay you big money.”
While we hungrily consume operatic lying and dissembling from the likes of reality TV stars, we still won’t tolerate it from our flesh-and-blood political candidates, says Thompson — unless we aren’t really sure whether they’re lying.
Did George W. Bush know Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMDs when he ordered American troops into Iraq or was he duped by bad intelligence? Polls say half of us think he lied and the rest believe the president was acting on the only information he had at the time.
It’s up to the press to tell us when our leaders aren’t being straight with us, something journalists don’t do often enough, says Paul Waldman, a senior fellow with Media Matters for America, a progressive Web-based watchdog group. “There’s a real reluctance to get too tough with people in power,” he says. Reporters often shy away from coming right out and saying a politician has lied.
“We as a society do not value the truth,” says Atlanta divorce attorney John Mayoue. Statistically, about half of the promises of fidelity made at the altar are broken. He points the finger at the “Me Generation,” beleaguered Boomers who enshrined the self to the exclusion of all others.
“Selfishness justifies not telling the truth,” he says.
Mayoue hopes everyone will tire of the culture of deceit and punish rather than reward liars — slap them with perjury charges, vote them out of office. And refuse to buy their books.
*Oprah Winfrey later apologized on her television show for her judgment in supporting for a time the book in spite of its errors.
Andrea Simakis is a writer for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio.
