Alternate News

They Don't Drink From the River, Do They?

Upstream/Downstream

Out of the rocks in mountain regions, water gushes so pure you can drink it unfiltered and untreated. As the water runs down the slope it picks up a little silt and sand but is still potable. When it reaches the foothills where the first homesteads appear, and especially once it enters the first pasture land where the runoff from livestock production begins to drain into it, the water becomes less suitable for consumption and only the hardiest can ingest it without falling ill. By the time it reaches the lowlands, the stream has swollen into a river full of silt from mines and the sewerage of cities. Anyone foolhardy enough to taste it now is sure to get sick and may even die of the sequelae. Modern man has been wise enough to avoid drinking such toxic water.

The Problem

Yet, when it comes to information about his world, modern man greedily slakes his thirst at the mainstream, rarely seeking knowledge at its source where it is still pure.

While we can trust our fellow men to guard our water supply from disease sources, we are less fortunate where the guardians of truth are concerned. We are fed a daily diet of news far from the source, news that has been denatured so as to induce the unwary to mistrust their healthy instincts and common sense.

Recently a reporter from a local TV station contacted me regarding an interview on child custody. She said, "Do you really believe there is discrimination against men in custody court?" I said, "Let me ask you something. Do you know any men with custody of their children?" No, she said she didn't. I said, "Do you know women with custody of their children?" She chuckled and said she did, of course, quite a few of them. But she thought men didn't want custody. I then said, "Now you realize, of course, these men are usually paying anywhere from 25% to 50% - even more - of their salaries in the form of child support to women whom they no longer like very much. Does your common sense suggest to you that maybe most of these men would give a lot to have at least 50/50 joint physical custody of these kids and not pay this support?"

She admitted they probably would. And indeed, the few surveys taken among men on this issue, none of which has received substantial attention in the press, show that a majority of divorced and separated men want to spend more time with their children but are separated from them by a legal system many perceive as a juggernaut designed to crush them.

Yet the studies that have reached the mainstream suggest that men are indifferent toward their children and don't want custody. Indeed, these studies are based on statistics showing that most men do not, as a rule, sue for custody after divorce. Those at the source of the issue - the divorced men themselves - knoww the simple reason for this: Lawyers in father-hostile districts routinely tell men not to waste their money suing for custody because men do not get custody there. This fact rarely sees the light of day.

This kind of news blackout and distortion exists to some extent in virtually every area covered by the mass media.

Thus we are told the good news of a federal budget surplus but without any mention of the 5 trillion dollar federal debt or the fact that the service on this debt represents a staggering amount of waste.

We were told that the Serbs were oppressing the Albanians in Kosovo and were encouraged, accordingly, to fight the Serbs. Yet after the Serbs were subdued and the Albanians turned the tables, practicing genocide in Serb villages, the press practically squelched the story.

We were told that NAFTA would be a great opportunity to reduce the trade deficit. Almost a decade later, government statistics reflect an ever-widening gap in trade between Mexico and the US in favor of Mexico. Yet the press is silent on this.

The loss of father presence in homes has been paralleled by an increase in crime, drug use among juveniles, failure in school, teen pregnancy and suicide, in short, almost every social ill. Yet the Journal of the American Psychologist's Association in July of 1999 ran an article aimed at minimizing the role of fatherhood, ignoring solid studies demonstrating the importance of fatherhood in children's lives. The press presented the study as though it were the final and sole authority.

During the presidential campaign prior to the 2000 election, the TV networks ran polls to see which candidates won the debates. In each poll, Alan Keyes came out as the winner. Not one of the networks so much as mentioned this outcome.

We are increasingly fed a diet of information that seems designed more for the convenience of the media and academic world than for consumer enlightenment.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said in a lecture at Harvard University that the American press practices censorship quite similar to that observed in the Soviet Union, the chief difference being that here, the media censor themselves while in the Soviet Union censorship is government-imposed. A remarkably astute observation for a recent immigrant, particularly when many of us who have lived in America all our lives are oblivious to this phenomenon.

A related problem is the popularity of post-modernism, the notion that factual or objective truth is necessarily subordinate to social goals.

A salient example of post-modern corruption in the media and in academe is the story of Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, author of I, Rigoberta Menchú, an exposé of the horrors of the Guatemalan guerrilla conflict that cost her parents their lives. The author enumerates as factual various details of this conflict, for example, portraying her parents as poor Indian peasants whose small parcel of land was contested by powerful Hispanics. Anthropologist David Stoll investigated on-site in Guatemala and discovered that her father in fact had been a wealthy landlord whose land was contested only by his in-laws. Menchú's representation of herself as an illiterate monolingual, as well as her account of her brother's death, also proved to be fictional. However, the response in academe to Stoll's exposé entitled Rigoberta Menchú was overwhelmingly hostile to Stoll. The consensus seemed to be that misrepresentation of the truth is justified when a humanitarian cause is at stake. The notion that such distortion of fact may ultimately hurt the cause is widely rejected in academe. (See the article "R. Menchú: Tarnished laureate," by Larry Rohter, N.Y. Times, Dec. 15, 1998. http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/academia/rohter12-17-98.htm)

Concerned parents now need to ask themselves whether it is indeed prudent to send their kids to college these days and risk having them come back with less respect for objective truth than when they first entered the hallowed halls.

The Remedy

In the broadest terms, the only remedy in sight seems to be judicious use of the Internet. And this remedy should not be underestimated. The campaign team around Jesse Ventura said their e-mail networking made the difference between win and loss. Whether or not this is so, things will certainly never be the same now that the information highway is in place.

Already, newspapers are seeing a drop in readership as a result of the Internet. After all, consider that most Internet servers, magazines, TV news services and newspapers offer daily national and world news and numerous newspapers run local news sections on the Internet. As for classifieds and other advertising, Internet coverage is steadily increasing.

It is reasonable to assume that once home computers become as ubiquitous as, say, TV sets in American homes, traditional newspapers will see a more drastic sales decrease. Those that survive will do so by competing with web sites and news groups that do not practice the self-censorship seen in the mainstream media.

And that is very good news to those who want good news.

Don Hank