Twisting the Truth

Jan. 20, 2006 — -- The little white lie has long been judged morally acceptable to most people. But where do we draw the line? Is it really OK to play loose with the truth?

One of the biggest controversies about truth-stretching this month was created by the revelation that author James Frey had embellished details about himself in his best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." (Read authors' reactions to the James Frey controversy by clicking the related link.)

His book inspired people with a message of redemption from drug addiction, but some important details were false. The controversy was magnified because the book had been so strongly supported by Oprah Winfrey, an endorsement credited with increasing sales.

Winfrey later said she was disappointed by the controversy and depended on publishers to define the authenticity of a work.

There was a debate surrounding the controversy. Was the deception whitewashed because Frey's book had a redeeming value? Did that make Frey's distortions acceptable?

Steve Winn, the arts and culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, says, "No."

"Even though truth has become this kind of flexible construct that people are, you know, feel free to handle and manage in whatever way they will, the truth is still important. And when people are misrepresenting factual matters, I think that's troubling," he said.

People have sold their souls for profit or status -- no doubt since the first caveman lied about the size of his mastodon and got a place at the head of the campfire. And if the invention is something people want to believe, so much the better. In the Middle Ages, fake letters purportedly written by a rich eastern king named Prester John -- not only helped recruit crusaders for war; explorers including Marco Polo sought Prester John's wealthy but non-existent kingdom. It was a lie that was not only big, but politically useful, and it kept people busy on the impossible task of trying to prove it for centuries.

Hitler believed in telling enormous lies because, as he put it, "The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."

What distinguishes our own times, according to Winn, is the kind of participatory atmosphere in which all this takes place -- including the reality television phenomenon, and virtual communities such as Myspace.com and Facebook.com, where tens of millions of students now spend part of their social lives, posting profiles.

"I think there's a real sense that reality and truthfulness is a kind of self-invented phenomenon. That it's something that you can manufacture or construct in all these different ways. And so it's given people a sense that the truth is permeable or creatable or constructable, and that, I think, is new," Winn said.

One result is that people are often simultaneously cynical and gullible about what they believe. Some cynics who believed the government had covered up information about a flying saucer crashing in Roswell, N.M., in the late 1940s fell for one of the most-publicized hoaxes of the 1990s -- a television special claiming to show 50-year-old secret footage of an autopsy performed on an alien being in Roswell.

Steve Johnson, a special effects expert we consulted at the time, immediately dismissed the film as amateurish. Johnson built a model alien for "20/20" that included some of the subtle ingredients of what makes us vulnerable to such a hoax: the alien reflects us.

How was the alien autopsy hoax busted for good? Three years later, the producer of the original television special made another special exposing it has a hoax.

Hoaxes or lies that feed the built-in prejudices that people have or may have are some of the easiest to sell.

"There were famous hoaxes about Hitler's diaries and about lost Shakespeare plays and things of that kind that fulfill a longing for people to you know, have mysteries solved for them," Winn said.

Again, it was the outrageous size of the deception that had led some to accept it. For instance, if you claim to have communicated with an alien, it can be next to impossible to prove beyond question that it's not so.

On the other hand, putting a finger in your chili at Wendy's does leave a trail of evidence, and Wednesday it led to a nine-year jail sentence for Anna Ayala, who attempted to hoax the food chain out of a financial settlement by falsely claiming Wendy's sold her a bowl of chili with a piece of a human finger in it.

She now says her experience should be a warning to others.

Alan Abel, the subject of the documentary "Abel Raises Cain," is a professional hoaxer, who has fooled the media again and again over more than 40 years.

"I like to think of my hoaxes as having a message, and I also feel kind of comfortable with the idea that it's an opportunity for me to perform," he said.

He's drawn serious news coverage of what he purported to be a school for beggars, a campaign against breast-feeding and a society to clothe naked animals, among many other hoaxes.

"The intent is to amuse, to provoke, to give people a healthy kick in the intellect and make them laugh a bit," Abel said.

If there is a message in what Abel does it is that despite our cynicism we are still careless about who and what we believe. And there are moments when we want so desperately to believe that we always will be susceptible.

In a time when there is so much embellishment and re-invention, accomplished with such ease, the stakes go well beyond money and power and pretense.

Winn sums it up well. "[If] people really become so cynical that everyone is lying, that everybody in government is lying, that everyone in business is secretly you know, an Enron executive who's just waiting to bilk investors or, or the public in some way, then yeah, I mean, we'd lose the kind of trust that makes a society run and that, that we need in order to operate. If the public detaches itself completely from trust not only in officials, but in one another, then, you know, that's really alarming. It's a corrosive trend in society."