Dick Ebersol, head of NBC Sports, was concerned. NBC is covering the upcoming Olympic Games in Athens and he wanted to make sure that strong security measures were in place to protect the people working for his company. He sought a meeting with President Bush for reassurance.
The president personally met with him. Afterwards, at a gathering of the Television Critics Association, Ebersol recounted the meeting. Bush “really did know the facts” when it came to the minutiae of Olympic security arrangements, Ebersol said. This observation evoked laughter from the audience, as though they thought the NBC sports chief was being ironic. He had to assure the crowd, “I’m serious.”
In this era of twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage and instant commentary from cable news networks, web sites, and late night talk show monologues, it doesn’t take long for public figures to be saddled with bad reputations, deserved or not.
Ebersol’s experience of President Bush during his “face to face” didn’t conform to the media-generated picture of the President. That picture insists that Bush is as an intellectual lightweight manipulated by his handlers. Because of that image, a roomful of intelligent people found it hard to accept the different picture Ebersol painted.
Generally speaking, it seems that the media, voracious in its appetite for news and controversy, can be nonpartisan in trashing public figures. On the night of the Iowa Caucuses earlier this year, Howard Dean finished poorly in that first contest of the presidential nominating process. Concerned about the morale of his supporters, Dean decided to play campaign cheerleader. His “yee-hah” performance was shown repeatedly on TV. Supposedly serious people on news shows wondered whether the caucus-night speech indicated that Dean lacked the maturity to be President and speculated about how badly it would hurt his campaign. Dean was the victim of media-generated character assassination and it was wrong.
And of course, politicians themselves are often guilty of the most vicious character assassination. President Bush himself, for example, apparently authorized the recent production and webcasting of an ad that interspersed video clips of speeches by various Democratic Party luminaries with one of Adolf Hitler, implying that there was a connection between the Democrats and one of the most murderous despots in human history. That's unconscionable!
We can't control what people with their hands on the big media switches tell us about public figures. This comes as a simple plea for common people like me to pay heed to what we can control: Our reactions to the things we’re told about public figures. We need to be skeptical about assaults on people's characters and wary of those who do the assaulting.
The celebrities whose lives, accomplishments, mistakes, and alleged faults are so calmly sliced, diced, dissected, lampooned, and disposed of are, in fact, human beings. When their actions---particularly those of office holders---seem to violate good sense or cause harm, it’s absolutely legitimate to hold them accountable. But there’s no reason to assault them personally. There's no reason to fabricate destructive fictions under the guises of analysis or satire.
One of the commandments God gave at Mount Sinai--we Lutherans reckon it as the eighth commandment, others count it differently--says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Martin Luther, in typical fashion, fleshes out the positive spin on this commandment when he writes in The Small Catechism:
“We are to fear [that means to respect and reverence] and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the most charitable way.”
Of course, I can’t claim to keep this or any of the other commandments perfectly. I’m a garden variety sinner and I sometimes violate God’s will for my life. So, as horrified as I am of media-generated lynchings of people’s reputations and how we all seem to blindly subscribe to what the media tell us about people, I can be guilty of character assassination, too.
My victims aren’t just celebrities, though. Sometimes, I can be cruel in my assessments of non-celebrities, the people who populate my everyday life. Maybe you can say the same thing.
If so, there is hope. The New Testament book of First John says: “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous...” (First John 2:1)
For all of us who mar the reputations of others (and for all of us who sin, period), Jesus Christ can be the road to our recovery. We can be forgiven and start with clean slates. When we turn from our sins and turn to Christ, God forgives and then, gives us the power to keep turning from sin...even the sin of character assassination.
Maybe we Americans ought to informally declare a National Clean Slate Day. On it, we'll grant forgiveness to each other for all our past slandering of others and then, we'll ask God to help us refrain from verbally assaulting anyone. We'll also ask God to enable us to disagree without being cruel. We might even want to declare an International Clean Slate Day. Anybody interested?
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