You Are Being Lied To  

"Swift made it from Ireland to London just in time to cash in on the power of the newborn press to sway public opinion and to make or break political careers. One of the most influential politicians when Swift arrived was Robert Walpole, First Earl of Orford — a man accustomed to doing things in the old way. He was smooth as a mink at making connections in court circles, but he would by no means lower himself to hobnob with those ghastly writers swamping their stomachs with coffee. So though Walpole met with Swift once, he treated him rather rudely. Swift retaliated by writing a broadsheet filled with phony allegations that ran the man who’d spurned him through the muck and helped to permanently damage his reputation."--"The Puppets of Pandemonium" by Howard Bloom featured in You Are Being Lied To (2001) edited by Russ Kick

"In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Watergate muckraker Carl Bernstein uncovered a list of over 400 reporters and a coterie of publishers and media moguls who had basically been rubberstamping CIA propaganda since the 1950s. The group included Life and Time magazines’ Henry Luce (the same Life magazine that published out-of-sequence stills from the Zapruder film), CBS’s William Paley, and the aforementioned Arthur Sulzberger, as well as James Copley of Copley News Service, which owned and supplied reportage to a coven of newspapers like the San Diego Union and five major dailies in the Chicago metropolitan area. Bernstein said “at least 23” reporters and editors with Copley were certifiably on the CIA’s payroll."--"The Cove rt News Network" by Greg Bishop featured in You Are Being Lied To (2001) edited by Russ Kick

"You Are Being Lied To. It takes some nerve to give a book that title, eh? It came to me very early in the process, when this collection was just a germ of an idea. I did pause to wonder if it was too audacious; after all, I didn't want my mouth to write a check that my butt couldn't cash. But after spending several intense months assembling this book, I'm more convinced than ever that the title is the proper one. We are being lied to. In many ways.

For the purposes of this book, the definition of "lie" is an elastic one. Sometimes it means an outright falsehood told in order to deceive people and advance the agenda of the liar. Or it can be a "lie of omission," in which the crucial part of the story that we're not being told is more important than the parts we know. Sometimes the lie can be something untrue that the speaker thinks is true, otherwise known as misinformation (as opposed to disinformation, which is something untrue that the speaker knows is untrue). In yet other cases, particular erroneous beliefs are so universal — serial killers are always men, the Founding Fathers cared about the masses — that you can't pinpoint certain speakers in order to ascertain their motives; it's just something that everyone "knows." Sometimes, in fact, the lie might be the outmoded dominant paradigm in a certain field. A related type of lie — a "meta-lie," perhaps — occurs when certain institutions arrogantly assume that they have all the answers. These institutions then try to manipulate us with a swarm of smaller individual lies.

Which more or less leads me to my next point: This book doesn't pretend that it has all, or perhaps even any, of the answers. It's much easier to reveal a lie than to reveal the truth. As a wise soul once noted, all you have to do is find a single white crow to disprove the statement, "All crows are black." The contributors to this book are pointing out the white crows that undermine the "black crow" statements of governments, corporations, the media, religions, the educational system, the scientific and medical establishments, and other powerful institutions. Sydney Schanberg may not know the exact truth of the POW/MIAsituation, but he sure as hell knows that Senator John McCain does everything he can to make sure that truth will never be known. David McGowan may not know exactly what happened during the Columbine massacre, but he shows us that there are numerous puzzle pieces that just don't fit into the nice, neat version of events that's been presented to us. Judith Rich Harris is still building the case that peers matter more than parents, but she has soundly laid to rest the notion that parenting style is by far the most important influence on who a child becomes. Can we say that a divine hand didn't put a secret code in the Bible? No, not exactly, but David Thomas can show that 1) those "holy" codes also appear in War and Peace, The Origin of Species, and a Supreme Court decision, and 2) you can find almost any word or name you want to find if you torture the text enough.

There are some cases, though, when it's fairly safe to say that the truth has been revealed. Thomas Lyttle does show us that licking toads will not, indeed can not, get you high, and Michael Zezima definitively reveals that both sides committed atrocities during World War II. Meanwhile, Charles Bute demonstrates that the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous lifted their ideas wholesale from the evangelical Christian group they belonged to. They even admitted it!

Such cases of positive proof are in the minority, though. Basically, the pieces in this book show that the received wisdom — the common knowledge — is often wrong. Well, then, what's right? That's a much, much more complicated question, and the answers are elusive. Hopefully we'll all spend our lives pursuing them. But the first step is to realize that the "answers" that are being handed to us on a silver platter — or, perhaps more often, shoved down our throats — are often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the people promoting those so-called answers. That's where You Are Being Lied To comes in.

So dive in at any point, and you'll see that this book's title is deadly accurate. What you do about it is up to you. "--You Are Being Lied To (2001) edited by Russ Kick