Fantastic Fibs and Where to Find Them

By Heather Wilhelm

Thursday, October 01, 2020

 

Back when I was a kid — envision a quiet country neighborhood, rolling hills, children tooling around on bikes — I had a few friends who were more than a bit truth-challenged. Whether it was on the local baseball diamonds, in the halls of school, or on the various sets of mildly dangerous 1980s-style metal playground equipment we frequented, if there was a tall tale to be spun, they could roll it out in high style.

 

Picture a kid — we’ll call him “Carl McFibs” — holding court, a few other neighborhood kids gathered around, jaws agape. Did you know, for instance, that McFibs once stumbled upon a top-secret UFO base in the woods? Or that he once found an abandoned cherry-red motorcar left unlocked on the street, with keys in the ignition, allowing him to careen around various corners at 180 miles per hour? No? How about the massive crocodile that he once found lurking under the carpet of leaves that blanketed his grandma’s backyard pool?

 

My personal favorite story of the McFibbian variety involved one friend’s apocryphal trip to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It is true that the museum boasts an impressive indoor exhibit featuring a captured German World War II U-505 submarine. It is likely untrue, however, that the McFibs in question took a special submarine tour that went out into the waters of Lake Michigan, where the hapless U-boat was then attacked by a giant squid, its merciless tentacles cracking the ship in two, plunging hundreds of passengers into the frigid depths of the great lake.

 

This was all fantastic stuff, really, and highly entertaining. But if one or more of my McFibbian friends somehow grew up to become a member of today’s national media apparatus, I would not be a bit surprised. Am I alone, or does it seem like the news media get more truth-challenged and over-the-top and embarrassing by the hour?

 

Back in the olden days, our wizened, world-worn elders warned us not to believe everything that we read. These days, we might need to adjust that maxim to “Don’t believe anything that you read.” At this point, unless I know the author personally and also know that he or she is not deranged — this combination, it seems, is increasingly rare — I’m proceeding with caution.

 

To be fair, I realize that I am technically also part of the news media, but then again, I am not spending my time pounding out a ream of absurd, fear-mongering stories about Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee. One of the most notorious recent examples of this particular genre came from Newsweek, which breathlessly declared that Barrett “is affiliated with a type of Christian religious group that served as inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.” Oh, no!

 

Oh, wait, what’s that I see, buried at the bottom of the very same piece? Lo, it is a correction, stating that People of Praise, Barrett’s group, has actually never been mentioned as an inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale. A completely different group was, back in 2017. Oh, well, never mind. Same “type.” As they say in The Handmaid’s Tale, praise be.

 

“Who cares?” you might be thinking. “It’s just Newsweek!” Fair enough. I’m old enough to remember when Newsweek was at least a somewhat serious publication, rather than a slapdash online warehouse where despondent gender-studies majors aspire to write about their feelings. But unfortunately, it’s not just Newsweek. It’s Reuters, which ran with Newsweek’s Handmaid’s Tale angle just a day later. It’s CNN, which scrolled a puzzling chyron describing “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” across a startlingly clear visual of Kenosha buildings set completely and non-peacefully ablaze. It’s the New York Times, which reportedly stealth-edited key pieces of its widely discussed 1619 Project to backtrack the original and widely broadcast claim that our nation’s true founding should be 1619, not 1776.

 

Weird, right? What gives? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow recently argued that we face “a pandemic of media phoniness.” He explained: “Plastering the facts with attitude — tilting the story to the party line, moralizing it, sentimentalizing it, propagandizing it — is the way of noisy, distracted cable news and, increasingly, all of media. . . . News is laid before the citizen’s mind so packaged and tarted up with a narrative line that the simple facts are often impossible to discern.”

 

Perhaps the governing theory behind all this nonsense is that people are too exhausted to really pay attention anymore, which certainly makes sense. Even I occasionally want to tune out! But, alas, this is impossible, given that politics is everywhere. News. Sports. Unsolicited celebrity opinions. Unsolicited celebrity threats to leave the country, right after the celebrity in question has invested in a fabulous multi-million-dollar Malibu mansion, which makes me doubt said celebrity’s general sincerity. Fiction selections from my book club. Fashion blogs. Local schools. Neighborhood message boards. And let’s not forget the grandest pooh-bah of them all: social media.

 

I have occasionally thought about starting a local “Tired of Talking about Politics All the Time” Club, but sometimes I fear it would boast a membership of one. Even my kids have caught the political bug, taking an acute interest in this year’s election when I simply want to hide under a rock. Well, actually, that’s not true. I simply want to go to a really fancy spa in the desert that happens to be surrounded by rocks.

 

It is what it is, and so it will be, at least until November 3. Oh, who am I kidding — we all know the craziness will probably last beyond then. I hope everyone simmers down, but it’s probably going to be bonkers! After writing a whole column about fibs, after all, I cannot tell a lie.