Searching for the Truth

CBS’s 60-Minutes was planning to run a segment on their show about CECOT and what they deemed  “brutal and tortuous conditions.” But then the segment was pulled from the show in the US, reportedly due to pressure from the Trump Administration. Apparently, 60-Minutes in Canada didn’t get the memo, and the segment was aired in Canada. It then made it to social media, and many people in the US, along with independent media outlets saw the episode. Supposedly it has since been removed from YouTube, citing copyright infringement by CBS, but I haven’t verified that fact.

From what I understand the episode was chilling, but the contents of that episode is not really what this blog post is about.

This current bending of the knee by CBS is another example of how the free and open press in our country—something that is supposed to be enshrined in our First Amendment—is eroding.  Our traditional media outlets are looking far different from when I was studying journalism in college, a decade before Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine.

I have been writing for most of my life. My first novel at age 14. In high school, I was on the school paper, and its co-editor my senior year.  I studied journalism in college. At age 19, I wrote a screen play for one of my classes, which I later made into a book. At age 21, I wrote and produced a TV documentary for my senior project, that was aired on an educational TV channel in Southern California. In my thirties, I was the editor and publisher of a publication serving the communities of Wrightwood, Phelan, and Pinion Hills, California, called Mountain/Hi-Desert Guide, for about six years. 

In my forties, I wrote and self-published a book on local history, that I believe is still being sold in the Havasu Museum, and I wrote Lessons, an unconventional love story that I self-published over a decade later, and it was eventually made into a five book series, and its audio rights sold to Dreamscape Media.

These days I am known—by people who know me and I am not claiming to be some well-known author, I’m not—for the Haunting Danielle series, which currently has 37 books, and got me on the USA Today Bestseller list.

My point being—and yes, I do have a point—since I first started writing I have moved from fiction to non-fiction—and back again.

Those who took English with me in high school might remember I was probably the only classmate who looked forward to doing the term paper. I LOVED doing term papers. Seriously. I loved the research, which back then, meant visiting libraries and conducting interviews. We didn’t have the internet yet, and I was going to school in the remote community of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, so library access was limited.

When I was editor of Mountain/Hi-Desert Guide I regularly interviewed local people of interest, local politicians, and even got representatives from the county government and sheriff’s department to submit monthly columns to the publication. 

But my favorite was researching and writing about local history. Sometimes during my research, I would end up dispelling an accepted story on local history and set the record straight. I was somewhat obsessive about drilling down to find the source of the source. 

This was in the 1980s, and we still didn’t have the internet in Wrightwood. I often drove off the hill to visit some of the larger libraries and often visited the California Room in one of those libraries.

After one such visit and continually finding conflicting information from what appeared to be reputable sources, I asked one of the research librarians a question. 

The question: When you keep coming up with different stories about the same event, how do you know which one to use?

Her reply: Which ever version has been told the most frequently.

Her answer troubled me. It wasn’t what I expected—and it’s entirely possible that if I had asked another librarian the same question, they would have given me a different answer. But this is the response that I was given.

I find it especially troubling considering our current administration, especially with the pressure it’s exerting on corporate media outlets.

I keep thinking about the strategy used by many in this administration—if you repeat a lie enough, it will eventually be accepted as truth.

That lie ends up filling all the space, and suddenly we believe what they want us to believe.

We all need to be cognizant of how AI, coupled with our addiction to social media, makes it easier for someone with an agenda to overwhelm us with a false narrative—eventually replacing the truth.

And what makes this scarier—is when the folks with the agenda have the power to lock down the entities holding evidence of the truth.  Or in simpler terms, re-writing history.

(Photo: Bobbi Holmes. Early days of Mountain/Hi-Desert Guide, its first office in the basement, before moving to its downtown office.)