935 Lies
The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity
By Charles Lewis
364 pages
Published by PublicAffairs, 2014

‘[I]n the two years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials made at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Iraq.’  This statement, taken from a report published by a team of reporters and other contributors headed by Charles Lewis,  the author of this book,  is the starting point of this thought-provoking, meticulously researched examination of the lack of truth and integrity in the corridors of power:  in government, private industry and in the commercial media.

Mr. Lewis structures his thesis in three major sections. First, significant lies in the recent past, including deceptions about the Vietnam War, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the business community are explored. The second is an examination of commercial journalism today, and how changes in that arena have affected the ‘quality and quantity’ of news coverage. The third is his vision of the ‘future of truth’, how the telling of truth through the vehicle of investigative journalism–to the masses of readers, listeners and viewers–can be preserved, given the tremendous pressures to the contrary.

Charles Lewis has been an investigative journalist for over thirty years. He is a former producer of 60 Minutes, the founder of a non-profit investigative organization called the Center for Public Integrity, an author and university professor.

935 Lies is replete with examples of outright deceptions, obfuscations, and omissions by those in power, and the devastating results these practices have had on society.  And it is in chronicling the results of these practices, often contributing, or directly leading, to the death of tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of people, where the Lewis’ argument resonates strongest.

War

Mr. Lewis starts with America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Congressional passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August of 1964 dramatically escalated the U.S role in the conflict between Communist North Vietnam, and South Vietnam, a U.S. ally. The Resolution was passed after North Vietnamese patrol boats approached two U.S. warships which then opened fire, sinking one boat and badly damaging two others.   Two days later after another North Vietnamese attack, President Lyndon Johnson authorized the bombing of four North Vietnamese PT boat bases and a petroleum storage area.  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed 416 votes to 0 in the House of Representatives, and 88 to 2 in the Senate, to take all necessary steps to assist any Southeast Asia Treaty Organization member to defend its freedom. The lack of political opposition, of scrutiny even, was echoed by the national media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which supported Johnson’s decision.

It was years later that additional information was revealed. There was in fact no unprovoked attack by the North Vietnamese. Instead the U.S. had entered North Vietnamese waters to provoke them to turn on ‘their costal radar systems, thereby revealing their defense systems… [in so doing] provide intelligence for future air or sea attacks.’  Unbeknown to the American people, Congress, and the media, President Johnson had in fact been planning a wider war with North Vietnam for months—contrary to his public statements–and had explicitly threatened Ho Chi Min, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (also known as North Vietnam), to that effect.

Almost seven years later, in 1971, after President Johnson had left office,  a ‘trove of documents’ was leaked to the New York Times that ‘unequivocally’ revealed government deception and incompetence regarding the Vietnam War,  a war in which it had been involved for decades. The source of the leak was a Defense Department official named Daniel Ellsberg, and the documents became known as the Pentagon Papers.  The New York Times started publishing stories based on the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971. The federal government predictably pushed back and was granted a temporary restraining order against the New York Times, and later sought an injunction against the Washington Post, which had subsequently received the Papers. Ellsberg by this time had gone into hiding. Ultimately the newspapers won their respective court battles and the Papers were published.

What was the human cost of the Vietnam War? Currently there are over 58,200 names of service members on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C, (Encyclopedia Britannica).  In addition as many as two million civilians and 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and up to 250,000 South Vietnamese fighters, lost their lives.  How many of these lives would have been saved had the American people known the truth at the time the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed? I guess we’ll never know.

In retrospect it’s not difficult to draw a parallel between the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, an involvement based on flawed and, yes,  false information,  and decades later, the decision to invade Iraq, again under flawed, if not outright deceitful information about ‘weapons of mass destruction’.  According to the U.S. government over 4,000 American service members were killed by 2009, and 85,000 Iraqis lost their lives between 2004 and 2009.

There probably should have been lessons learned from the lies and deceptions that were uncovered about the Vietnam War, on the decision to invade Iraq so many years later. Sadly it seems that the power structure that was in existence in 1964 was still pretty much alive and well decades later.

Race

A chapter is dedicated to the issue of race. Stories are presented in lurid detail about the use of power by law enforcement in the mistreatment of civil rights workers, and of the abrogation of that power in prosecuting crimes committed against them. It required no less than the televised beatings of civil rights workers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the infamous Bloody Sunday in March of 1965 to turn the nation’s eyes on the struggles in Alabama.

As if to confirm the ability of the authorities to deny justice to those who did not have access to it, there’s this startling piece of information: more than 100 civil rights-related murders–committed between the 1954 landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.–remain unsolved to this day.

Again and again 935 Lies makes clear what can and does happen when those who hold power are not held accountable—whether on issues of race or in government; in allowing murderers to go free or, frankly, when the President of the United States orders a break-in at the headquarters of his political rivals—the book presents a vivid argument of the disastrous consequences inherent in the misuse of power and the deceptive practices of those who wield it.

Business

It’s not only the powerful in government that are scrutinized.  Examples of the misdeeds of the powerful in business are described as well.  The book presents compelling evidence of the information big tobacco companies had accumulated on the dangers of their product. While never actually denying their products’ harmful effects, top executives nonetheless stubbornly defended their products by casting doubt on the veracity of the studies and reports that documented the dangers.

The first major study linking the use of tobacco and a shorter life expectancy was published in 1938, yet for decades, despite numerous studies confirming the harmful effects of tobacco, the so-called ‘mainstream’ press covered precious little of the topic. Why? Mr. Lewis suggests the answers lie in the extraordinary amount of revenue the press had received from tobacco advertising. The notable exception to this trend was Reader’s Digest, whose business model at the time was based on paid subscriptions, and not on advertising revenue.  Ultimately, however, the growing body of scientific evidence could not be ignored and the Public Health and Cigarette Smoking Act was signed into law in 1970, and cigarette advertising was banned on television and radio on January 1, 1971.

And what is the human cost of cigarette smoking?  According to Mr. Lewis a 1964 surgeon general’s report put the death rate of lung cancer among male cigarette smokers at 1,000 percent of that of non-smokers. To further quantify the human cost, about 100 million people around the world have died from smoking-related illnesses during the twentieth century, according to the World Health Organization.

The initial lack of the ‘mainstream’ media to tackle the tobacco story underscores a reality in both print and broadcast media today—public ownership and the requirements to make a profit. The argument is that long, investigative pieces are simply not profitable, and therefore are just not pursued, the glaring exception to this being the long-standing stable of Sunday night on CBS, 60 Minutes.

The author also describes attempts by corporations in other industries to obfuscate the truth about their products, including DDT and other pesticides and herbicides.

The Press

One of the most salient arguments Mr. Lewis makes, I think, is in the failure of the ‘mainstream’ press to explore complex and difficult issues, often due to the poor economics of these stories in the present revenue-driven journalistic climate.

The author makes several recommendations to address this lack of independent, long-form investigative reporting, and the search for truth to make those in power accountable. The first of these is the ‘non-profit’ investigative reporting organizations, the foremost of which is his own creation, the Center for Public Integrity.  By breaking the shackles of a quarterly profit and loss statement, these organizations are theoretically able to pursue big stories, stories that do hold those in power to account, without the fear of losing advertising dollars. Other recommendations include partnerships between non-profits and university journalism programs, which can provide a source of low-cost, high-quality talent, and partnerships with other non-profit investigative organizations.

But even with these new approaches to ferret out the truth in the corridors of power, the challenge of finances and pressure from the powerful never completely goes away.  These organizations must be vigilant to retain the integrity of their coverage, despite the self- interests or objections of their donors. This is just a reality of functioning in a free-market, capitalist society. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you will require the financial backing of people and organizations that may object to your work.

Summary

The book is extremely well-written. At the outset the subject may appear dry and laborious to follow, however with the use of personal anecdotes, some personal opinion, quotes from friends and colleagues–many of whom the reader will have heard of—the book reads more like a well-paced political novel than a serious work of non-fiction with seventy-four pages of endnotes and an eleven page bibliography.

There’s pathos, lots of pathos, in this book. The good guys don’t always win. There’s pathos in the deaths of the hundreds of thousands who have lost their lives due to wars that could have been prevented if those in power simply told the truth. There’s pathos in the millions of lives that have been lost on the altar of commercial profit in the tobacco industry and others. Many of those lives are in poor and underdeveloped countries. There’s pathos in the more than one hundred civil-rights related murder victims, and their families who have not received justice. There’s pathos in the journalists who’ve had the courage to take on large corporations or powerful politicians only to subsequently lose their livelihood. Finally there’s pathos in the author’s own story, on quitting a high-profile job at 60 Minutes, on principle, objecting to the program’s demands on one of his stories, and his subsequent effort to start up his own non-profit organization, and having to put up his own house as collateral to do so.

Mr. Lewis does not attempt to distinguish between the possible motives behind the lies and deceptions. One can argue that there are different shades of gray among the underlying reasons for misleading one’s audience. For instance Mr. Lewis alludes to President Obama’s now infamous promise that under the Affordable Care Act, also known as ‘Obamacare’, anyone who likes their current healthcare plan will be able keep it. After the Act was implemented that promise turned out not to be true for some policyholders, prompting widespread criticism and, in many instances, outright scorn in the media.  I think that you can plausibly argue that the President’s initial statements, which no doubt were aimed at alleviating fears about the impact of the Act, is substantively different from cigarette companies knowingly disseminating a proven carcinogen for decades, while publicly casting doubt on their products’ harmful effects, solely for the purpose of maximizing profits. No one, at least to my knowledge, has died because of the President’s statements, but, as has been mentioned above, millions of people have succumbed to lung-related illnesses linked to smoking. Mr. Lewis does not make these distinctions; the reader is left to do so for himself or herself—and I believe, rightly so.

Finally, the fact that a book like this can be published and freely distributed is a testament to the extraordinary freedoms the author and his readers enjoy in their own country. Those in power still practice lies and deceptions, but fortunately there are mechanisms in the political and social systems designed to expose them. There are undoubtedly numerous countries around the world where those mechanisms do not exist, where a book like this would be banned, and the author summarily imprisoned—or worse.

This is a personal reflection on the book, 935 Lies. I’m not a book critic or a political scientist.

Weldon Turner