When I was a youth I read a lot of science fiction short stories, and fantasy too, some dating back to the earliest days of the genres. One of my all-time favorite stories is Anthony Boucher's novella "We Print the Truth," published in 1944.
It has an absolutely terrific setup and really works the premise out well. In the story, John McVeagh, the editor of a small city paper, is granted one wish -- and his wish is that his newspaper live up to its proud and lofty slogan, "We Print the Truth." Back in those days, children, newspapers really prided themselves for genuine (not pretend) objectivity, desiring to actually tell the public the facts. Our hero's wish reflects well on his character and dedication.
That's how the trouble starts.
He envisions the wish being a preventive against the paper printing anything false, but it doesn't work out that way. When a 77-year-old resident passes away, a typo in the obituary lists the man's age as 17. Thus, the coroner and McVeagh are shocked to find in the casket the body of a teenager.
As he begin to realize what this magic power means for the paper, McVeagh decides to change the world. He goes for broke and runs a story that World War II is over! The Allies have won! And the whole town reads the news with great joy.
Except the war is not over. Everyone within the paper's circulation district believes the war is over, but it's true nowhere else. When the FBI sends a man to find out why the factory has stopped fulfilling munitions orders and the draft board stopped sending men, he too believes the war is over when he enters the town. All over the world, however, the war continues.
And that's just one crazy issue caused by the power of this particular press.
I've given away enough of the plot; you can read the story at the Internet Archive. Just look for the collection of Boucher stories entitled The Compleat Werewolf, and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's worth the time.
I guess I was thinking of it because, while few journalists really seem to care about the truth today, they sure want to change the world. But, as with McVeagh, they really have far less power over the world than they think, even if they're willing to run the truth into the ground and spit on it to make it what they want. Of late we've been given a very good look at what they mean by "truth," and whatever they mean by it, it sure isn't true.
The one thing that gave them legitimacy, honesty, is the currency they paid for power, and now they find themselves with much less of both.
P.S.: My favorite science fiction short story is “Happy Ending“ by Henry Kuttner, if you’re curious. There are spoilers, so don’t look for plot summaries.
Today's Press does reap a lot of benefits and power from being a government propaganda organ...
ReplyDelete...and I'm shocked that I could so casually write those words here on a cloudy Wednesday morn. We really have fallen a long way, haven't we? Somehow I thought the future was going to be different than this.
It sounds bad but I have had enough of making the world a better place types. Make yourself a better person and the world will follow.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (https://archive.org/details/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron/) at around age 11. Yet another eerily prophetic work.
ReplyDelete"THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."