Wordsmanship

Wordsman, sharp thy pencil.

   Self-appointed guardians of the public morals insist that the "right" way of behaving is their way, and others should behave in the manner specified by them.
   Too often, however, these same guardians do not practice what they preach. In the public world, then, it falls to others to point out the hypocrisy, and report the details to members of the general public who perversely may choose not to believe evidence, but to hold tightly to what the self-appointed leader tells them.
   To a large extent, the leader's success is a combination of showmanship and salesmanship, and there are many examples of this phenomenon in literature and in life.
   A prominent fictional example of rampant hypocrisy is "Elmer Gantry," the 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis, brought to film life in the movie of the same name.
   Lewis often brought his sharp pencil to bear on abuses found throughout the country, at first in news reports, and then fictionalized. John Steinbeck did the same, as did Ernest Hemingway. Their novels live on, while people forget the factual basis for much of their work.
   Journalists today deal with similar issues. Their task is to expose lies and hypocrisy, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
   The downside is that they are often attacked by those same people who are the targets of journalistic exposes. The upside is that these same attacks and criticisms are duly reported in the news media, thus extending the print and airtime life of the very stories that the perpetrators prefer be buried and ignored.
   Criticizing reporters doesn't make the story go away. They only sharpen their pencils and work more diligently to uncover more detailed information to back up the first story.
   Magazines, too, historically have had a reputation of digging up facts to document that the self-appointed political or moral guardians are not what they claim to be. Theodore Roosevelt famously coined the term "muckrakers" to describe journalists who rake through muck to find and publicize details that would tarnish the carefully polished reputation of many public officials.
   But rather than be embarrassed by the term, the diligent journalists adopted the term and gloried in their roles as muckrakers.
   So it is with journalists today, and the core of the issue is a choice of whom to believe; the politician or the reporter -- the blustering candidate who insists he is the sole repository of wisdom but provides no evidence for his claims, or the many journalists who document their reports with easily provable evidence.
   Or, as Chico Marx once put it, "Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"