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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