Truth has taken a licking lately, but it has no shortage of defenders in its corner. Whether debunking the embellishments of memoirists or lambasting filmmakers for fudging facts, the righteous have arisen.
Those who had begun to suspect a national slide into mendacity must take heart at the recent spectacle of Oprah Winfrey flaying James Frey on national television. First, she had stood by her book-club boy, intimating that it did not matter that he had made up some of the rough-and-tumble in A Million Little Pieces. Then, sniffing the winds, she backtracked into veracity's waiting arms for a comforting "there, there." She had made "a mistake" in discounting the value of truth, she confessed. Tearfully channeling Jimmy Swaggart in her self-founded Church of On-Air Redemption, she enacted its crucial rite of Admitted Miscue. No such luck, though, for Gored Jim, who excused himself from several public appearances afterward.
Elsewhere, stewards of the inconvenient detail have lashed out at such movies as Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich for condensing and personalizing historical events. Jack Shafer of Slate first took George Clooney to task for fictionalizing some elements of Good Night, and Good Luck, then took after former NPR host Bob Edwards for making some of the same errors in his hagiography, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. Shafer indignantly decried the implication in both book and movie that CBS yanked Murrow's public-affairs show, See It Now, because of fallout from the show's confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In fact, the show continued another year in prime time. More to the point, Shafer took two columns to pull Murrow down a few pegs, arguing, for instance, that McCarthy was washed up by the time Murrow got around to him, and that Murrow is overrated as a journalist-hero.
The case against Steven Spielberg's Munich is murkier, not because it plays loosely with the truth—it opens, after all, with the caveat, "Inspired by real events"—but because it offends various visions of Truth. As its co-screenwriter, playwright Tony Kushner, put it in a Jan. 22 commentary for The Los Angeles Times:
"In the last month, the co-creators of Munich have been accused of being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel, defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking about receipts and handling money. We're morally confused, overly complicated, simplistic. We're cowards who refused to take sides. We took a side but, oops! the wrong side."
The loudest complaint, however, is that Munich equates Palestinian and Israeli violence. Those saying so point to Israel's goal to limit civilian casualties and the Palestinians' determination to cause them. But Henry Siegman, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of the American Jewish Congress, notes in The New York Review of Books that Israel has a nasty history, going back to its founders, of killing "innocent civilians," too.
That killing begets killing is the central truth of Munich. Spielberg, never the most subtle of filmmakers, ends the film with a shot that lingers on New York's skyline, the doomed Twin Towers painfully evident, indicting all that will lead to their collapse and all that has happened after it. "I think it's the refusal of the film to reduce the Mideast controversy, and the problematics of terrorism and counterterrorism, to sound bites and spin that has brought forth charges of 'moral equivalence' from people whose politics are best served by simple morality tales," Kushner writes.
All novels and films, and many nonfiction works, are morality tales, at least those that try to unveil a larger Truth, whether or not they enlist facts to do so. It is not too simplistic to suggest that it matters only that an artist be honest about using fact or fiction. Shafer, for example, partly excuses Clooney, who tweaked the truth for dramatic action, but cannot do the same for Edwards, who got facts wrong in a biography. But Kushner's "morality tales" suggest the morality play, entertainment staple of the medieval world, in which all truths stemmed from sacred givens. This mind-set endures in a politics that infers fact from ideology, rather than deducing conclusions, and forming policy, from facts.
The enemy of truth is not fiction but the public expectation that a good story trumps a true one, a trend observed a few weeks ago by The New York Times' Frank Rich. Citing the "truthiness" index of Comedy Central faux-journalist Stephen Colbert, Rich found it anything but a joke. Even real journalists, after all, preoccupy themselves with the stagecraft of statecraft, not with discriminating truth from spin. Meanwhile, a public bombarded daily by lies, from ubiquitous marketing to administration talking points, no longer cares. Some are blinded by religious dogma, but mostly simply want to forget the last morality tale and get on with the next one.