Silence Ain’t Golden

“Every word has its consequences. Every silence too.”

Jean Paul Sartre

Gustave Flaubert once said, “there is no truth, there is only perception”.

Often silence is perceived as truth.

I can still remember when journalists produced reports that were not stories based on a fictional view of events but, rather statements based on proven facts. Journalists like Walter Cronkite of CBS, and Frank Cesno and Bernard Shaw of CNN left no room for doubt when they spoke on television.

Indeed, after Cronkite returned from a visit to Vietnam and reported that the U.S. was on the losing side, President Lyndon Johnson told aides that if they had lost Cronkite, they had lost the people. And indeed they had.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, Cronkite announced it simply on television, wiped a tear from his eye, and continued professionally as was his wont. The program continued with factual reporting from Dallas with no commentary other than facts.

William F. Buckley, a very conservative journalist, never engaged in hyperbole or insults. Always maintaining a calm demeanor, he would articulate conservative views with respect for his guests and audiences.

Today, things are different.

Breaking news is instantly accompanied by panels of talking heads speculating seven ways to Sunday with such immediacy that their views, as outrageous as they may be, soon become conflated with whatever facts are available.

Once these views appear on social media, they take on a life of their own. As Winston Churchill once said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.

Perception and silence.

Together, they form what passes for news today.

Selective silence is as effective as a lie.

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7^th, both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) banned their journalists from labeling the Hamas attackers as “terrorists”. Many in the Canadian government, fearful of alienating Muslim voters, also avoided criticizing the terrorists, preferring to attack Israel for its response.

Police in many major cities refused to arrest violent pro-Hamas demonstrators as they attacked Jewish institutions and businesses, as well as individual Jews on the streets and on university campuses. Authorities refused to stop students from engaging in hateful activities and desisted from expelling them from academic institutions.

Many United Nations spokespersons preferred to name Israel as the culprit and avoided mentioning the heinous crimes committed by Hamas terrorists during their rampage. Indeed, many continue to avoid speaking about the rapes and desecration of corpses by Hamas terrorists, including UN Women whose job it is to promote women’s rights and defend them from attacks from any quarter.

It took many weeks before police authorities addressed the many blockades that pro-Hamas demonstrators had set up to block key arteries, as well as tear down the Hamas flags protestors had raised to replace national flags. Indeed, Canadians, Americans, and Brits who came out with their national flags were turned away by police for fear that the pro-Hamas demonstrators would feel provoked.

By caving in to the perception that the “context” of protests had to be considered, the silence of the authorities gave protestors wide berth and served to underscore the perception that Jews were somehow responsible for the attacks against them.

Mayors of major cities have remained silent before these provocations and have instructed their police forces to remain on the sidelines while demonstrators destroyed public and private property and threatened the well-being of both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

Social media has accelerated the dissemination of this fake information with lightning speed, and the truth has been carefully hidden behind a wall of lies and selective silence.

There is no excuse for the lack of professionalism that underwrites today’s mainstream media. Nor is there any justification for government or police responses to criminal activities.

Today’s journalists are, overall, beholden to the corporate interests of those who employ them and avoid mentioning inconvenient facts.

Indeed, most serious journalists in Canada have not investigated the reasons why Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre refuses to submit to a security check so that he can receive sensitive intelligence information. Many serious U.S. journalists have not conducted exhaustive investigations into Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and the billions of dollars of funding and benefits they reportedly received from China and Saudi Arabia while employed at the White House.

And these journalists don’t question Trump or Poilievre seriously or assiduously as they should in the lead up to important elections in both countries.

It should come as no surprise then that fewer and fewer people depend on mainstream media for their news, preferring to obtain information from social media.

This is disconcerting because news on social media is not fact checked nor does it necessarily come from proven professional sources.

Thus, we are a society growingly bereft of truthful information.

Instead we are bombarded with words that lack veracity, silence that hides the truth, and perception that passes for objectivity.