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"What," Pontius Pilate is said to have asked, "is truth?" The Greek word in the text is αληθεια. It suggests "unveiling," or what my dog-eared lexicon says: "the reality lying at the basis of an appearance." Hence, "truth" is not what I say it is, or what you say it is. Truth is what it is.
Politicians as a type have not been particularly careful about finding out and telling the truth. Truth often inhibits them in their race to electoral victory. Some large portion of the electorate seems to have become inured to that carelessness. It calls to mind the idea that if one keeps on telling the same lie, it becomes the truth by repetition.
In the American tradition, we have relied on the press -- or what is now known as the "media" -- to call out the liars and in so doing stating what is the truth as best it could be found it out. Praise be to the news organizations and their reporters who still do that hard work on our behalf under the aegis of the First Amendment.
However, the vocation of reporting is not always appreciated, especially by those whom the truth can hurt. But I think we are in new world where the "media" and its investigations are concerned.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became national heroes as a result of their dogged pursuit of the truth about Watergate. Their indefatigable reporting and their newspaper's courageous printing of it helped bring down a warped and lying president whom truth hurt very deeply.
It's a different game today. In the never-ending presidential campaign, reporters are out there or at their computers searching for what may have been suppressed as inconvenient truths by candidates. When in press conferences they ask about what they have discovered, they are publicly scolded by candidates. That's nothing new. It's the roar of audience applause that greets the candidates' scolding of the press, claiming that people are tired of the media -- an unwelcome echo of Sarah Palin's scorn of the "lame stream media."
In such a way, the truth is not only orphaned but sometimes killed off along with him who brought it. Plutarch's Life of Lucullus tells of an early occurrence of this very thing:
"The first messenger that gave notice of Lucullus' coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information."
The best reporters with whom I worked at what was once a very fine daily newspaper were utterly unafraid of the Tigranes type. Once they had unearthed the truth of a thing, they did not hesitate to file their story. Editors did not hesitate to publish it. Thus in my time at the paper did hard-won reportorial truth cause a hundred bad doctors to be removed from the practice of medicine, a murderer to be tracked down all the way from Michigan to Pago Pago, and a popular clergyman to be exposed for fraud.
Mostly the reading public seemed satisfied that their 25 cents-a-copy newspaper was doing its job. We did not hear so much the sneering condemnations now broadcast coast to coast. We were not seen as the bad guys.
No presidential campaign since the first one I am able to remember -- that of 1948 -- has seen the tables turned against the press as the one now in progress has done. Ben Carson is able to wave away reporters' questions and bathe in the wild applause of his supporters. Donald Trump is a vendor of untruths in virtually every ranting speech, caring not a fig for the presence of reporters.
The truth about Marco Rubio's credit cards may never be known. If it were really no problem, he could long since have released all the relevant documents. And the truth, such as it might be, would be known. The old Nixon trick of digging truth's grave in the dead of night could well work -- especially if the electorate turns against reporters and their news outlets.
Certainly some journalists somewhere must be at work excavating the bits and pieces of Hillary Clinton's life over the past 40 years. If one or more of them were to find and publish heretofore undisclosed information of a damaging kind, I have to wonder whether those audiences that join Ben Carson in his vilification of the press for its work of reporting would, in Clinton's case, praise reporters and embrace their findings.
I think one cannot decide which truth to accept and which to refuse since, in the biblical sense at least, truth is truth and has a life of is own.
No one is saying that the press should have its constitutionally guaranteed freedom abridged. Rather, the message seems to be that a lot of people just don't care about reporting that, if given attention, would spoil their image of the particular messiah they believe is a godsend who will somehow make everything okay -- never mind the facts.
Pontius Pilate's question "What is truth?" is given answer in the same gospel in which the question occurred: "You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Notice the verb "to know." In the original text it is the translation of a word meaning "seeking to know, inquiry, investigation." So the truth one comes to know is not of an a priori kind -- as in "This is true because I say so" -- but of the kind that comes of observation, careful analysis and evaluation. It's called "knowledge."
How does such knowledge set one free? Again the original text is revealing. To be made "free," from the Greek term ελευθεροω, is to be emancipated as if from slavery. Truth is the emancipator, freeing one from ignorance -- willed or otherwise.
The press -- or, if you insist, the media -- can, by extracting the truth of a matter and making it known, serve as the emancipator. Love freedom? Love truth. Reject truth? Say goodbye to freedom.
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