The Ugly Truth

BY MICHAEL BUGEJA

Keats wrote that beauty is truth, and truth beauty, and that is all we know on earth and needed to know.  

Then again, he died at 25 and writ his name on water. I’m 55 and write on liquid crystal displays.

Truth is supposed to set you free and beauty, take your breath away; but ugly truth paralyzes like apnea: You forget to breath.

I confronted an ugly truth last month when NBC television reported that it would pay Paris Hilton $1 million to learn about her jail house experience. Caught driving with a suspended license while on probation for drunk driving, she wept for her mother when led to her cell but emerged, she claimed, with new insight into the human condition.

The continuing focus on Hilton, the oxymoronic “reality television” star, has reached pandemic proportions, so much so, that The Houston Chronicle used this headline on a political column about romantic woes of socialist (not socialite) Ségolène Royal in its June 19, 2007 edition—“Paris (France, not Hilton) and great summer viewing.”

Helen has seen her share of ugly truths. Everything she feared about government has come to pass, from war to global warming. She will be 87 next month. Still, she perseveres, “holding the banner on honor” and writing about injustice in the world.

Few people anymore recall the saga of Kate Webb during the Vietnam War. She was believed captured and killed in Cambodia, only to emerge to write her truths in words that still haunt me. One of her leads echoes more of Mary Shelley than Keats: It was like a butcher shop in Eden, beautiful but ghastly.

Kate, who died earlier this year, was a role model for many of my generation.  

I reported for UPI in the 1970s when media helped end the U.S.-Vietnam War and The Washington Post exposed the ugly truth about Richard Nixon. I investigated banks and nursing homes and covered riots in prisons and substandard housing on Indian reservations, along with natural and manmade disasters such as floods and near-extinction of the eagle.

Words had the power to topple presidents, stop wars, enforce laws, expose fraud, save lives and, on occasion, even species.

I saw beauty in words, in truth. So much so, that I would leave UPI and profess that, teaching thousands of aspiring journalists how to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Then the comfortable bought the franchise, and it’s been a party ever since.

In December’s Ecologist, I wrote about “The Electric Cabaret,” recounting how society was amusing itself on demand with cell phones, iPods and other gizmos. Shortly after that article appeared, I gave a speech about the state of the news media.

In 2003, I noted, top stories were the war in Iraq, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia, the sex scandal of entertainer Michael Jackson and the murder of a pregnant woman in California, Lacy Peterson. The television talent show, “American Idol,” was the most popular, and Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were the most sought after celebrities. Time magazine’s person of the year was “The American Soldier.”

Things haven’t changed that much. In 2006, we were still dealing with the Iraq War, American Idol, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. NASA was in the news with astronauts gone wild in adulterous affairs. Time’s “Person of the Year” was “You” in a tube, inspired by the sale of YouTube for $1.65 billion to the search engine Google.

“The best is yet to come in 2007,” I prophesied in my speech. “Top stories will be, let’s see … the Iraq War, a Presidential election whose outcome will be determined by YouTube or blog … replete with nauseating follow-ups on Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, punctuated by scandals stereotyping athletes or beautiful women murdered or gone missing in exotic places.”

It has been much the same in the U.K. In 2003 and 2006, the Iraq War topped the news. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ranked 4 and 7, respectively, in the BBC’s top entertainment stories last year. Brits still obsess over Princess Di with the latest disclosure that Camilla Parker-Bowles never wanted to marry Prince Charles.

How do we end the 24/7 news cycle of skin-deep beauty and surface truths? How do we face the truths of our lives, that what we perceive as ugly—that paralyzing apnea of recognition—says all we need to know about where society has faltered?

During such moments, I usually think of Kate Webb. In one of her last interviews, she confided to me that in matters of conscience, as of heart, there are no boundaries or overriding principles. “You come up with your own solution” to injustice “and then live up to that in your actions.”

That remains the key to many of our social ills, in our own lives and in the news media. Certainly, we need more courageous journalists to commit to truth and fight injustice. But we also need an audience that understands the price of admission in Disney’s new media amusement park.

It is no surprise that Disney, a company whose brand is a cartoon mouse, is one of a handful of conglomerates controlling global media, along with the likes of Time Warner, Viacom, Bertelsmann, General Electric and Murdoch’s News Corporation. The Big Four on Internet, controlling much of the advertising revenue, are Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

We live in their mediated world whose story boards resolve problems in the allotted time frames. Life doesn’t follow art in an artless, ugly world. If it did, I’d be quoting Keats now who, according to literary legend, died because of a bad review—“snuffed out by an article,” as Byron put it—and who believed the fiercest hell was failure in a great endeavor.       

Our life work may seem a waste when like Keats we invest in outcomes rather than in actions. Ugly truth ferments and occasionally transforms society, with those responsible long gone without recognition, like Kate Webb, whose byline was writ on the world and changed the world.

During her captivity in Cambodia, when we thought she was dead, she had a moment of clarity, she told me, during an interrogation. She credited that moment as helping to secure her release. “The old man, you know, I looked at his face and he was tired and sick. I said, ‘You’re an officer doing your job, right? Well, I’m a journalist doing my job.’” 

If journalists did their job as Kate did, we’d be released, too, from our own bemused captivity. Until then, our yardstick is the conscience and whether we honored it. Only then can the ugly metamorphose again into beauty, if not in society, then inside us.