Sometimes Lying Means Only Telling a Small
Part of the Truth
R.U. Sirius with Michael Horowitz and
the Friends of Timothy Leary
Frequently the mainstream media lies on
behalf of the system by what they don’t tell us. A few years ago
when the Clinton Administration blew up a pharmaceutical factory
in the desperately impoverished Sudan, claiming that it was a
chemical warfare factory, it was front page news for a couple
of days. A few days after that, when it was revealed that the
administration might have (self-admittedly) been wrong about the
factory, it wasn’t even in most newspapers. The devastating effect
of the loss of that country’s only pharmaceutical factory has,
of course, received even less coverage still in the mainstream
press.
The media don’t always feed us vacant pabulum
out of a desire to keep us ignorant. Sometimes they’re just plain
lazy. Back in late June of 1999, brief items appeared in papers
and newsweeklies across the country telling us that anti-authoritarian
counterculturalist Timothy Leary was "an FBI informant." The articles
were based on an FBI document released to The
Smoking Gun Website. Nearly all the pieces that appeared about
this were brief, three paragraphs or less. None explored the circumstances
that led to Leary’s testimonies, and this old news-which was amply
covered by the media in the mid-70s when the testifying was occurring-was
treated as a shocking revelation.
As someone who sometimes writes for the mainstream
press and knows how their editorial processes work, let me assure
you, this was probably not a conscious conspiracy. The mainstream
media simply don’t think Leary is worth more than three paragraphs.
Bringing out the fact that this was old news, or that it involved
a complex situation, within three paragraphs would have left too
many hanging questions. This final assault on Leary’s reputation
via oversimplification was a simple matter of word count to the
media owners.
I decided that I wouldn’t stand still for
the slander. With the help of drug historian and Leary archivist
Michael Horowitz, I wrote a statement challenging the mainstream
media version of the story, and within a couple of weeks we got
Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Tom Robbins, and a large group of
countercultural luminaries to sign it. We sent it out to the media
and posted it on Disinformation. Despite the big names attached
to it, the media ignored our dissenting view.
Oh well. At least you can read it.
this article copyright 2001 R.U. Sirius
You Are Being Lied To copyright 2001
The Disinformation Company, Ltd.
