I thought it was harmless when my doctoral class photoshopped me into a retaken class photo that I was absent for. I gave my approval for them to photoshop me into the new picture. At the time it seemed like a convenient solution to a problem. That was when the technology and the concept was new. The idea that this was deceptive didn’t occur to us because the central truth was that I was in fact part of this class and the picture they used was from the previous group photo. But today, the innocence of that solution feels utterly lost. Perhaps there should have been a tagline that read, “Juanita Hall was photoshopped into this picture”.
I’ve begun to ask myself how much lying we can endure before we lose all faith in what we hear and what we see? In the age of technology, when people can use free computer software to place people where they are not, make people appear to say something they didn’t say, or simply remove people from where they shouldn’t be or edit out what they should not have said, truth is becoming elusive. There are too few taglines to correct the actual record. We’ve come to rely on news media to tell us when a video has been altered. But what if it doesn’t serve the corporate interest to tell us?
Add to this that we have a president who lies almost every time he opens his mouth. Without any real consequences, the lying in our society has become the norm. Just look at the parents who made their children complicit in lies about their sport participation or SAT scores to get them into elite colleges. It used to be that the public shame faced by lies being revealed was a deterrent. No one wanted to be labeled a “liar”. But no more. I hate looking at the smug face of Lori Loughlin. At least Felicity Huffman shows remorse and humility born from her public shame. Loughlin is the opposite, refusing to admit that her lying and bribes were wrong. The question is who do we want to be as a collective human society?
At the beginning of the Trump presidency, people labeled his lies as anything other than lies out of respect for the office. They would say things like, “The president misspoke”, or that his comment wasn’t accurate, or that he misrepresented this or that. They would say that he was wrong about this fact or that fact. But now after so such a blatant disregard for the truth, they openly say, “The president lied”. Some call him a pathological liar. Others are actually counting the number of lies he has told. What we have lost is the ability to believe anything that comes out of his mouth. We have a president who tells us not to believe what we see or hear. He will make a ridiculously false statement and claim the next day that he never said it.
The fact is that President Trump has no credibility and neither do those who surround him. It appears that those in his administration are willing to lie along side of him. I’m glad Sarah Sanders has resigned, but I will never look at her as an honest person worthy of trust. She has violated the public trust. People in Arkansas would be foolish to vote for her for governor or any other office. The attorney general lied about the findings in the Mueller investigation and he is the top law enforcement officer in the nation!
What happens to a nation when truth becomes elusive? Who and what can you believe? It’s a scary thought, but that is where we find ourselves and I’m scared. My solution is that we need a law that requires taglines whenever non-fictional public video or pictures are altered to substantially change time, place, and content of an event. We have to demand truth or it will become unbearably elusive.