Opinion Archive

Agustin Barrios Gomez, president of SolutionsAbroad.com, has been commissioned by the newly-relaunched English-language daily The News to produce a weekly opinion column on Mexican current affairs. The column is published every Wednesday in the paper and also here online. Our president is a member of the Mexican Council on Foreign Affairs and is an analyst of politics in North America with a degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

What to Make of Public Lies and Innuendo

July 30, 2008

In the aftermath of the difficult election of 2006, there was an article by a well-known columnist in Mexico in which he talked about his encounter with Luis Carlos Ugalde, the president of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Mr. Ugalde had invited the journalist to breakfast in a good faith attempt to clarify what had happened on election day. This was important to him because he felt that, in the columnists fervor for backing the candidate of the PRD, he had overlooked the significant amount of honest work that had been done. The journalist subsequently wrote an influential column attacking him both professionally and personally, painting a distorted picture of their meeting and quoting him out of context. Independently of Mr. Ugalde's actions as head of the Institute, the acerbic editorial was treacherous.

People build careers out of betrayal, distortions, lies and innuendo. When it's about actors and movie stars, it's salacious. When it's about politicians, it's snide. Either way, it's dishonest and nasty. And we love it.

What we are saying is that "you are fair game because your desire to lead us exposes you to our ridicule". More succinctly, "we own you". But beyond the personal tragedy that slander entails, there's a more insidious issue.

When bad things happen to good people

Good people are avoiding public life because of systematic character assassination on behalf of the unscrupulously ambitious. This is true in both Mexico and the US and we, as the public, are guilty of egging them on.

This column has decried the "hate profession" before. The "industry of scandal" works in tandem and it is enjoying its heyday. Today, we have an unprecedented responsibility to interpret information intelligently, but we are coming up short. In the same way that Weimar Germany became a tragic example of the most advanced society creating the world's most hateful monsters, there are thousands of intelligent individuals who dedicate their time to a twisted version of journalism. They do it because we give them the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol talked about. These often sociopathic individuals end up saying what's necessary to make a mark on the world, even if that mark is charcoal black.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

So, what distinguishes Woodward and Bernstein from the proliferation of vicious bloggers who now seek refuge on the Internet? How can we protect ourselves from our own instinct to dignify rumor and innuendo? By asking, first, is it relevant? Second, is it credible (in terms of the medium, the context, etc.)? Does it make me angry, or does it get me thinking? Lastly, am I participating in a smear, or an analysis? Usually, when it's the former, there are telltale "cheap shots", such as statements about luxury that have more to do with the chip on the exponent's shoulder than the subject at hand.

Those who participate in the "hate profession", and its similarly ugly cousin, the "scandal industry" are heaping suffering on the subject of their derision. But they are also setting themselves up for heartache. They are aware of their lies and they know when they are appealing to their audience's basest instincts. In the end, they get marginalized. Or they get a "rant" show where they are forced to be hateful gossip-mongers throughout their professional lives. Either way, it has to be an awful way to live one's life: just look at the furrowed brows on that Australian-owned cable network.

Before the Internet, defamations had a short life. Desperate rabble-rousers had to search through arcane books and documents at their local library to find something of interest. Now, everyone can destroy anyone else. Once you post something on the Internet, for as long as people pay their webhosting provider, it remains written in digital stone.

No recourse

The upshot is that defamation, hatemongering, jihad-training and other real-life shoot-em-ups are now the most successful "Massively multiplayer online role-playing games" ("MORPGS"). "Second Life" is nothing compared to the audience of this pernicious sport. What is worse, as anybody who's ever run for town council knows, reacting is counterproductive. In what has to be a prime example of bitter irony, public figures are forced to be silent on the issues that are most important to them, personally. The law might punish, but it won't help.

In the Internet age, truth is irrelevant. Binary code does not distinguish between malicious slander and worthy investigative reporting. We are left to our own devices. For the system to work we need to exercise caution. So cancel your RSS feeds and subscriptions to sources that act in bad faith. Repudiate the lies and denounce the innuendo. Act like our democracies depend on it. Because they do.

For the latest thought-provoking article by Agustin Barrios Gomez please go to our Opinion Column page

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