Wal-media: the ugly untruth

It’s getting harder and harder to trust your eyes. Recently, the Pentagon admitted that it is… It’s getting harder and harder to trust your eyes. Recently, the Pentagon admitted that it is planting stories in Iraqi newspapers in an attempt to paint America in a more flattering light.

“Oh, we never really liked that daughter anyway. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” This could be a story that might be planted in a Baghdad daily by some army agent. OK, maybe not. Still, we are trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign people by concentrating on the good things we are doing for them instead of acknowledging the harm we are doing them, such as raining bombs, troops, missiles, bullets and Geraldo Rivera onto of their homes and neighborhoods.

While the army tries to win the hearts and minds of a foreign people, Wal-Mart is trying to win love and affection back at home. The New York Times reported last week that the massive general store is reaching out to Web logs — blogs — in an effort to change the way it is perceived in the “M.S.M.,” otherwise known as the “mainstream media,” i.e. “reputable, non-basement-dwelling sources.”

Weirdoes on their computers everywhere are getting exclusive stories, ones that show Wal-Mart’s side. They are also getting the opportunity to go to special conferences in Wal-Mart’s national headquarters, according to the Times, in exchange for reporting favorably on the retailer, and bloggers are jumping at the opportunity. They wish to see the headquarters of Wal-Mart, which legend has it contains more than 12,000 aisles of merchandise.

It just goes to show you that now, more than ever, you need to take everything that goes through both retinas with a grain of salt and a pinch of cynicism. More and more often, we find ourselves unknowingly at the mercy of advertisers and publications that are being paid to use their cover as independent agents to promote certain things, be it political messages or consumer products.

The advertisers are often so good that they can weave in their subliminal messages without anyone being any the wiser. Starbucks.

Businesses are exploiting our desire to know for their own purposes. Drive the New Ford F-150. Earlier this year, the news anchor at a television station in Los Angeles was given a new kitchen in exchange for an understanding that the anchor would use her role to plug the kitchen remodeling business. The line between news and advertising is getting blurrier and blurrier. Windex.

Businesses are hardly the only groups doing this. The Inter Press Service News Agency showed in a report that the Bush administration spent well over $1.5 billion contracting media-savvy public-relations firms in order to put the best face on what is bad news, and to gain more, better coverage for good things. Remember the president landing on that aircraft carrier after the “end” of the war and saying “Mission complete?” Butterscotch crumpets.

Presented with such incredible events as the president landing on an aircraft carrier, the opportunity to take a grand tour of Wal-Mart’s headquarters or getting a new kitchen, it is sad to say that more and more often, the media is selling out. We are settling for what we hear straight from the horse’s mouth rather than probing more intriguing parts of its anatomy for possibly a better and more truthful story.

Well, I for one think it’s high time that we make an effort to return to our journalistic roots. Durex brand condoms. Did Upton Sinclair sit back and read PR brochures that the meat company provided to him? No, he went undercover and documented garbage, rats, wood chips and people being turned into sausages. Have things changed? No, sausages are still disgusting, and God only knows what they are made of. But because of Sinclair’s investigation, people today have a say in whether they eat pork sausages or become accidental cannibals.

We need to do a better job at getting to the truth. There are more ways than ever before for lies to reach us, and we are soaking them up. Think of Fox News, for example. Shy of sealing yourself in a cave, which I’m not saying is necessarily a bad idea, we need to make sure that we question what we hear more often and acknowledge that what we hear might have been said for a reason.

Fresca: the official grapefruit-flavored soda of The Pitt News. E-mail Sam Morey at smorey88@hotmail.com.