935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity Hardcover – June 24, 2014

There's just no two ways about it. History has shown that an active and engaged press is absolutely essential to the health of our republic. Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, Iran-Contra, Big Tobacco, race relations, the IRS, DDT, the NSA, Obamacare...one has to wonder how the history of our nation might have been altered had the American people been told the truth and given more of the cold, hard facts concerning these and a host of other monumentally important issues. According to author Charles Lewis it all began to unravel with the emergence of the "military industrial complex" that President Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address in 1961. Indeed, for more than half a century now far too many politicians, bureaucrats and corporations have been playing fast and loose with the truth...and all too often with tragic results. Meanwhile, the consolidation of media companies has gutted newsrooms at all of the major networks and at newspapers and radio and TV stations in cities and towns all across America. Investigative journalism has all but disappeared. Lewis spent most of his adult life in the field of investigative journalism and he has an awful lot to say about the subject. Over the past nine years he has collected his thoughts, experiences, ideas and fears in anticipation of this project. The final result is his thought-provoking new book "935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of Moral Integrity". For anyone even remotely interested in the future of journalism in this country "935 Lies" is a "must read".In the opening chapters of "935 Lies" Charles Lewis chronicles some of the most egregious examples of government officials and corporate spokesmen blatantly misrepresenting the facts on a number of key issues. LBJ and officials in his administration were clearly guilty of this as they went about the business of escalating the war in Vietnam. Only a handful of courageous politicians, most notably Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright, dared speak out against the dubious course that was being charted. Then there was the well-documented cover-up by President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal and the 935 lies about the presence of weapons of mass destruction that the author claims President George W. Bush & Co. told in the run-up to the Iraq War. But the lies and deception have not been limited to just government officials. Over the past half-century corporations have been increasingly guilty of misrepresenting the facts and withholding crucial information from the public. Halliburton comes to mind as a prime example. Charles Lewis also spends considerable time discussing the tobacco industry. He explains why the tobacco industry was not the least bit interested in learning about the health effects of the product it was peddling and why large segments of the press were never eager to cover the story. The relationship between government, corporations and the media was becoming more and more incestuous. Lewis could see the handwriting on the wall and decided to bail out of the mainstream media in the late 1980's. He had another approach in mind. On March 30, 1989 he founded the Center for Public Integrity whose stated mission was to "to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions in order to cause them to operate with honesty, integrity, accountability and to put the public interest first."In the final chapter of "935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of Moral Integrity" the author addresses "The Future of Truth" in America. He is cautiously optimistic. Lewis reports that promising new alliances are being forged between for-profit and non-profit journalism organizations. There appears to be a long-overdue renaissance of interest in investigative journalism. Increasing numbers of college students are showing interest in making investigative journalism a career choice. The author has even proposed a new brand multi-disciplinary academic field that he has dubbed "Accountability Studies". I think it is a marvelous idea! I found "935 Lies" to be an especially well-written book. Charles Lewis managed to hold my interest from cover to cover. Given the lackluster coverage of the current administration by the mainstream media I can only hope that Charles Lewis' optimism is justified. I will close with a salient observation from Sissela Bok's seminal 1978 book "Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life" that dovetails quite nicely with what Charles Lewis is talking about in this book. She writes: "All our choices depend on our estimates of what is the case; these estimates must in turn rely on information from others. Lies distort this information and therefore our situation as we perceive it, as well as our choices." Bok goes on to say that "To the extent that knowledge gives power, to that extent do lies affect the distribution of power; they add to that of the liar, and diminish that of the deceived, altering his choices at different levels." Very highly recommended!

Charles Lewis' book, 935 Lies, would make a fine introduction to reality for anyone who believes the U.S. government usually means well or corporations tend to tell the truth in the free market. And it would make an excellent introduction to the decline and fall of the corporate media. Even if these topics aren't new to you, this book has something to add and retells the familiar quite well.The familiar topics include the Gulf of Tonkin, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the civil rights movement, U.S. aggression and CIA overthrows, Pinochet, Iran-Contra, lying tobacco companies, and Edward R. Murrow. Lewis brings insight to these and other topics, and if he doesn't document that things were better before the 1960s, he does establish that horrible things have been getting worse since, and are now much more poorly reported on.The New York Times and Washington Post were afraid not to print the Pentagon Papers. Nowadays a typical decision was that of the New York Times to bury its story on warrentless spying in 2004, with the explanation that printing it might have impacted an election. TV news today would not show you the civil rights movement or the war on Vietnam as it did at the time.Lewis has hope for new media, including the Center for Public Integrity, which he founded in 1989, and which has produced numerous excellent reports, including on war profiteering, and which Lewis says is the largest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the world.Points I quibble with:1. Human Rights Watch as a model media organization? Really?2. The New America Foundation as a model media organization? Really?3. Think tanks as a great hope for integrity in public life? Really?4. After making 935 of the George W. Bush gang's lies a book title, you aren't sure he "knowingly" lied? Seriously?This is the guy who wanted an excuse to attack Iraq before he had one. He told Tony Blair they could perhaps paint a U.S. plane in U.N. colors, fly it low, and hope for it to get shot at -- after which conversation the two men spoke to the media about how they were trying to avoid war. This was January 31, 2003, and is quite well documented, but I don't think a single reporter who was lied to that day has taken any offense or asked for an apology. This is the president who rushed the war to prevent completion of inspections. This is the president who made dozens of wild claims about weapons without evidence -- in fact with evidence to the contrary.Not only does overwhelming evidence show us that Bush knew his claims about WMDs to be false, but the former president has shown us that he considers the question of truth or falsehood to be laughably irrelevant. When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had claimed with such certainty that there were so many weapons in Iraq, he replied: "What's the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger." What's the difference? It's the difference between lying and meaning well. This interview is available on video.5. Why not bring the trend of lying about wars up to date, I wonder. Since I wrote War Is A Lie we've had all the lies about drone wars, the lies about Gadaffi threatening to slaughter civilians, the lies about Iranian nukes and Iranian terrorism, the lies about Russian invasions and attacks in Ukraine, the lies about chemical weapons use in Syria, the lies about humanitarian and barbaric justifications for attacking Iraq yet again. It's hard to even keep up with the pace of the lies. But we ought to be able to properly identify the mother of all lies, and I don't think it was the Gulf of Tonkin.6. Lewis's model of integrity is Edward R. Murrow. Among Murrow's independent and heroic credentials, according to Lewis, is that he met with President Roosevelt hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, I take nothing away from Murrow's reporting and the stand he later took for a free press. But why did Lewis bring up this meeting? And once he'd brought it up why did he not mention that Murrow told his wife that night that FDR had given him the "biggest story of my life, but I don't know if it's my duty to tell it or forget it." The Murrow depicted by Lewis would have known what his duty was. Murrow later told John Gunther that the story would put his kid through college if he told it. He never did.That many people will not immediately know what the story was is testimony to a pattern that Lewis documents. Some lies take many, many years to fall apart. The biggest ones sometimes take the longest.

It is very good to start with but it soon degenerates into an autobiography which lacks relevance to the advertised subject

A good bit of research has gone into this book and will inform as well as entertain