As our trust in the news media plunges, other professions must step up when it comes to standards of truth telling.
Take a look at this graph.
It tells you all you need to know about what the public thinks about the news media.
Gone are the days when Walter Cronkite's tagline was "the most trusted man in America."
Since then, the public perception of the news profession has flipped upside down.
Our confidence in journalists to report fully, accurately, and fairly is at a record low, and our trust in them continues to crater.
Only politicians and advertising executives rank lower in polls ranking the trustworthiness of various professions. Oh, the humanity!
The best we can say about the modern news media is that it is better than Pravda. (If the name "Pravda" isn't ringing a bell, I'll provide a historical refresher a little further down.)
Speaking of ad execs, a trustworthy one recently gave me this advice: "All great ads come at it from the problem they are trying to solve, and devise a succinct and clever message that sticks with the consumer."
I thought about this while watching the Super Bowl commercial for the Google Pixel 7. Its succinct and clever message went something like this: "Hooray, I can erase people who annoy me! Just like Amy Schumer! Goodbye to all those photo bombers and ex-boyfriends! MAGIC!"
Don Draper might approve this message, but I do not. My initial impression is that the "Magic Eraser" on the Google Pixel 7 is pure evil and must be destroyed.
Other than that, it's a nifty feature.
But we're not talking about a little red eye filtering, or cropping to fit the dimensions of a frame. We are talking about permanently removing aesthetically displeasing humans from our recorded lives.
To reiterate: Oh, the humanity!
The idea of conveniently removing inconvenient humans, as if they were mere dust on the camera lens, is more than a little creepy to me. In my profession as a nonfiction editor, it is borderline unethical at best, and Pravda-like at worst.
If you are still drawing a blank on the name Pravda, let me refresh your memory.
Pravda became the official newspaper for the Soviet Communist Party shortly after the Russian Revolution. It was the weaponized propaganda arm of the Soviet totalitarian state. The Kremlin would force its reporters to print stories favorable to the concepts, slogans, and ideas of Bolshevism, and paint the West, particularly the United States, as a brutal and inhumane enemy.
For instance, Pravda told its readers we fed the corpses of Korean War prisoners to our dogs, and warned the Czech Republic that we planned to test poison gas on its people in preparation for a larger war with the Soviet Union.
(While our CIA has committed its share of notorious extrajudicial deeds, I'm pretty sure neither of those atrocities really happened.)
Pravda was all about manipulating the truth, and was particularly infamous for doctoring photographs by airbrushing disloyal communists out of historical photos.
Their identities were expunged from the paper record, never to be mentioned again by name among loyal party members.
This effort to "disappear" people who did not follow lockstep with the totalitarian state inspired the Orwellian concept of an "unperson."
The propaganda effort with Pravda at the center was so effective at erasing collective memory that even Czechs and Poles who carried American liberators on their own shoulders in 1945 had forgotten these events by 1948, when the Soviet Union brought down its Iron Curtain on much of Europe.
The citizens under their rule knew better than to contradict the Stalinist regime. Anyone who dared commend the Americans as liberating heroes risked drawing the attention of the secret police; after which they would mysteriously disappear, and not just from photographs.
So basically, the Google Pixel 7's Magic Eraser is a dream come true for future Pravda newsrooms, loyal Bolsheviks, and America haters. (How's that for clever and succinct?)
You might say I'm a little inflexible—perhaps even bourgeois—when it comes to the latest craze in photo editing. Before erasing me for being disloyal to technological advancement, please understand that my position comes from a set of guiding principles for excellence in nonfiction.
This brings me to my 10-Value Pledge to clients. Each of these core values begins with a commitment to truthful storytelling—the hallmark of all great nonfiction.
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This pledge is my personal and professional anchor, and clients I've collaborated with appreciate this commitment to them and to the end product.
Trust is everything. Once lost, it is impossible to recover, as our floundering news media has discovered. Hopefully it's not too late for them to correct course, but I'm not holding my breath for them to come around.
As the great truthteller Thomas Paine once said, and General Patton liked to repeat, "It is time to lead, follow, or get out of the way."
If you believe in these 10 core values as much as I do, and are looking for an editor, I happen to know one.
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