The search for truth

From the Editor

In our previous issue, I related the story of one Micah Spradling, who sued Dr. Michael Dini of Texas Tech for requiring a student to accept evolutionary theory before receiving a letter of recommendation. In the article, I wrote that Spradling had never attended Dini’s classes, information I had found in early press coverage of the suit. Those articles, and mine, were in error: Spradling attended three or four of Dini’s lectures before launching his suit. I regret the error.

If I hadn’t corrected the mistake, it would have negated the point of the article: that deliberately obscuring the truth to suit your political aims is counter to everything we hold dear about the free exchange of ideas. Good journalism rests on the same foundation as good science, and they both share a core value with humane politics: people are generally best served through an unflinching pursuit of the truth.

You might think I’m making too much of a minor correction, and you might be right. But I’ve been noticing more and more examples of statements needing correction where none was forthcoming, and I’m starting to wonder whether that basic honesty is fast becoming a lost art.

Take, for example, some recent back-pedaling by the White House. Beleaguered by global criticism over not finding the slightest trace of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, Bush attempted to shift the goal posts of the discussion, recasting his earlier absolute declarations that Iraq had WMD by saying “We said that Iraq had a biological weapons program.” (Emphasis ours.) Fortunately, most observers caught the sleight of hand.

Or take the recent spat between FoxNews correspondent Bill O’Reilly and comedian Al Franken over O’Reilly’s false claim to have won two Peabody Awards, which then degenerated into a desperate series of prevarications O’Reilly could have avoided by saying, simply, “I was wrong.”

But our side could learn a little honesty as well. Consider the recent email flurry alleging that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the US invaded Iraq because it “floats on a sea of oil.” Anti-war folks trumpeted the quote as evidence that they’d been right all along, and that Wolfowitz had at last admitted it.

But what Wolfowitz actually said at the IISS Asia Security Conference was not the smoking gun it’s been made out to be, although still reprehensible: “We had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that… is a major point of leverage…. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances, which are very different.”

That’s a subtle but important distinction. It would have been nice if Wolfowitz said what we thought he said, but we shouldn’t let our desires for neat sound bites blind us to reality. Their side has the guns and the money: all we’ve got is the truth. We can’t afford to let that truth go, even for a second.

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