BY LUKE WARM
PROFESSOR OF MENDACITY
UNIVERSITY OF MUNCHAUSEN
Students — I apologize for interrupting the flow of my lecture series on “Merging the Big Lie with the Little Truth.” But just today I was shown a masterpiece of underhanded deceit masquerading as righteous indignation so courageously, diabolically misleading that I feel compelled to doff my hat to the geniuses at the University of Michigan who invented this marvel of treachery aimed at discrediting a legitimate work of journalism.
I am very tempted to include this case study in my forthcoming textbook, Dissembling in the Academy: Handbook for Skullduggery and Backstabbing at the Modern University.
The case I’m about to describe involved a difficult situation for the institution in question. The facts at first blush seem to be against them. A reporter showed up on campus and requested an interview about a subject that was highly sensitive.
We should keep in mind that ALL subjects in the academy are highly sensitive. That is Rule Numero Uno.
Next, any press report that goes to print outside the academic institution’s control is, ipso facto, to be judged “highly critical,” “completely negative,” and “irresponsible.” Other adjectives may be applied where necessary. I repeat, any story that cannot be and has not been censored by the university is by its very nature biased, jaundiced, preternaturally hyperbolic, and contemptible.
That is Rule Numero Uno.
Did I say that already? Every rule I cite is Numero Uno!
In this case, the University of Michigan was dealt a bad hand. They were faced with a reporter who gave them ample time to grant interviews and guide his reporting. They had a clear opportunity to steer their story in a desired direction. Instead, however, they chose the path of stonewalling.
Rule Numero Uno: When public officials make bad decisions, mendacity consultants make big bucks!
For the public official, there are two co-equal evils. One is sitting for a media interview. The other is not sitting for an interview. Not taking the interview is always advisable. Unfortunately, it is a stance that cedes moral authority to the journalist. Certainly, the official who dodges a reporter can offer the excuse of “tied up in a meeting.” Such ploys have a shelf life. Meetings seldom last a full day, let alone a week. Thus, when a reporter approaches his quarry several days ahead of his deadline, the target will need a more persuasive pretext. But in the U of M case, while the reporter spent several days trying for an interview, no excuse was given. Credibility is supremely important, especially where an institution is sowing mendacity left and right. Some semblance of an excuse for why officials were not forthcoming is necessary, but in the U of M case it was not supplied. Not good for the institution, but fertile ground for the professor of mendacity.
While this university was digging a hole for itself in the public relations sense, one good can come out of the stonewall: a refusal to provide information does not foreclose officials from loudly criticizing defects in the published report.
Would that be two-faced? Mendacity, thy middle name is Hypocrisy!
In the present case, sad to say, the officials elected to play dead for six days. This was an ambitious tactic, because it is impossible to justify repetitive reticence. But I will say this — it takes outrageous nerve to pull off a six-day stone face.
Speaking of chutzpah, one of the UM officials actually was seen by the reporter in her office sitting at her desk accomplishing no work other than telling her secretary that she didn’t want to talk to the reporter, no reason given.
Special skills of misdirection are needed to put a shine on such egregious misbehavior by an official on the public payroll.
Some may be moved to criticize the officials for their noncompliant approach to media relations. However, it should be recognized that officials have advantages that few are willing to admit. In the United States, many people are taken in by the myth of a free, independent press beholden to no interest and devoted to upholding the rights of the downtrodden and poor. This delusion works to the advantage of the public official whose purpose is to suppress knowledge and truth. While there will be the occasional aggressive, troublesome reporter, editors typically are cowards. They will predictably cave when pushed. So the stonewall can be successful if the news hierarchy follows its well-worn highway of talking big and buckling under the lightest resistance from an intended target. See my textbook, Art of the Bluster (Phineas T Books, Wartbegone, Michigan, 2018).
In the Michigan case, the reporter was not calling in response to a university press release. That is a sign of trouble. The press release will emphasize certain facts the institution wants known while ignoring facts injurious to the institution’s reputation. Press releases can control the reporter’s mental discourse. In this case, the reporter was calling out of the blue. No university official wanted the Detroit Free Press to run an article about the environment for black students at the University of Michigan. Even a positive article could be negative if it spurred rivals to produce copycat articles that sought to distinguish their reporting by finding something unpleasant from the institutional point of view. Thus, the officials were correct in principle in hoping to derail the reporter.
Officials may also have counted on journalists to hold or even kill the reporter’s story if official comment was lacking. News media put great stock in appearing “balanced.” But it is a mistake for officials to bank on the balance credo as a self-imposed restraint by journalists on their own work. Unfortunately, it is possible to achieve balance outside control of the target institution. Indeed, the U of M burned itself by publishing in-house reports on racist behavior on campus. A journalist may utilize such self-inflicted damage in place of official comment, which happened in this case.
Nonetheless, a news outlet that runs a piece that lacks official comment runs the risk of being called “unbalanced.” That outcome occurred in the case of “Being Black at UM,’ published by the Detroit Free Press on March 31, 1985. The article was immediately excoriated by regents and top administrators at the university in phone calls to Free Press editors. The article appeared on a Sunday. On that day, a regent called a high-level editor to complain that the university was blindsided. There was “no warning” that a story was coming, the official told the editor.
On Monday, a Free Press editor accused the reporter of failing to request an interview. Unfortunately for the administrators, one of their secretaries had coached the reporter in composing a list of questions that revealed the outline in detail of his planned article. The administrators had copies of the reporter’s questions on Wednesday, the day when one of them was seen and heard by the reporter to refuse an interview. I will not pull my punches. This was a very bad situation for the university and for the officials. The reporter had documentary proof that he had not committed a sneak attack, and his proof made liars of the university officials.
The April 8, 1985 Frye rebuts ‘biased’ Free Press article complete 4-8-1985 2-20-2019 quoted Provost B.E. Frye indirectly stating that “the article appeared with no warning to U-M officials of its highly critical nature, Frye said, nor time for them to comment.” Here would have been a good place for Provost Frye to stop commenting, although in this short statement he already has committed a contradiction that will be difficult for a mendacity specialist to explain away. But he unfortunately continued to comment, apparently, unable to prevent himself from spewing facts that further undermined his veracity.
In plain English, once he started lying, he couldn’t stop.
Here is a paragraph from the University Record quoting Provost Frye on his failure to speak to the reporter:
Frye said he also had strong objections to the article’s implication that he and (Vice President Nyara) Sudarkasa had refused to talk to the Free Press reporter or to provide him with minority enrollment financial data. “This simply is not true,” he declared. “This man, after being told no time was available on one day, gave up on an interview, left written questions, and then went ahead with the article before the reply could be mailed back to him. There was no input from us.”
No professional manager of mendacity could have devised a more exquisite set of interrelated prevarications. The University Record proposes that:
— 1. “The article appeared with no warning” and adds that the reporter allowed “no time for them to comment.” How could officials comment if they didn’t know about the story? How could officials comment if they didn’t know about the story? How could they comment if they had “no warning”? When two ends of a statement clobber each other in this manner, a lie is revealed.
— 2. The reporter gave up trying to get an interview. Again, Frye acknowledges contacts with the reporter belying the claim of “no warning.” The lie is repeated.
— 3. The reporter wrote his story without waiting for the officials to mail their responses to his written questions. For the third time, Frye acknowledges that he was warned after claiming “no warning.” The lie layers upon itself.
Here is a real challenge for the practitioner of mendacity. Of all untruths, the self-defeating, or self-contradicting lie is the hardest to erase. Which end of the whopper does one tackle? If left alone, “no warning” would be defensible. But requests for interviews and written questions? The most dimwitted of observers will notice the recurrent admission of warnings given but denied by officials.
And yet! And yet, what a compact little network of opposable lies!
What artistry!
Let us for a moment relax and savor deceit woven at the high level one would expect of such an august university as Michigan. Not only has the university portrayed itself as the victim of a sneak attack, but it has pictured the reporter as an impatient fellow who gave up when told officials would not speak to him and then submitted written questions but “went ahead with the article before the reply could be mailed back to him.” One wonders what barn he grew up in!
Really, we must enjoy the beauty of what I term a “verity reversal.” Conversion of a reporter into a villain. There are reasonable people who might judge that the reporter traveled to Ann Arbor from Detroit and expended several days of his time trying to interview the officials. A reasonable person might wonder why officials refused to speak to a reporter, especially after they received a list of questions that outlined the main points of his story. Why, a reasonable man or woman might wonder, did the officials not at least offer the reporter a credible reason why they refused to meet with him? Would they not want to influence his reporting? Why, a reasonable person might inquire, would an educated man, a university provost, think it expedient to mail his answers to a reporter’s questions when the provost knew there was urgency in the matter — a so-called deadline — that would dictate using the telephone rather than the postal service or perhaps even having a face-to-face conversation with the reporter who was available and actually present in his office several times over several days?
The challenge for the professor of mendacity is to persuade the reasonable person that the reporter was somehow at fault, possibly for being born in the first place.
The University of Michigan went to print without responding to any of those hypothetical questions, and yet, the institution prevailed. After publishing one “highly critical” article that officials found offensive, the newspaper groveled back to Ann Arbor and produced a follow-up article that reflected only their views. Rumors of mistreatment of the secretary who dared to help the reporter remain rumors following a Free Press editor’s judgement that she “wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole!” and an executive editor’s declaration that he didn’t want to “be treated like a nigger,” possibly referring to his abuse by higher-ups in both the newspaper and university bureaucracies. Final insult to journalistic integrity: the newspaper’s refusal to acknowledge a commendation from the Michigan NAACP for the article’s candor in discussing racial issues.
Kudos to the University of Michigan! What might have been a productive public discussion of racial conditions on its Ann Arbor campus received the best journalistic award of all — the Order of the Big Spike.
A toast to the Victors Valiant:
Champions of the West,
Mendacity at its best!
If you wish to contact me, I may be reached via my agent at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
