As next year’s election gears up it seems our politicians are at it again, feeding us lies and misinformation so they are not painted as being negative. Just ask Howard Dean how well telling the truth helped his campaign for president? It seemed the more Dean talked truthful about the problems facing America, the more the media painted him as negative. In fact leading up to the Iowa Caucus, 70% of columns written about Dean contained negative language to describe him, according to a study done by FAIR magazine. But this isn’t about Dean, but a bigger problem we have in our country; fearing the truth. Take for instance the run up to the Iraq war, only one American news source, Knight Ridder, was saying the WMD’s do not exist. And where did they get this information? Right off of the US government’s own website that outlined the UN weapons inspections. So many people in the media were ignoring the truth about WMD’s even the Knight Ridder journalists covering the story started to doubt themselves.
Why do we paint people who tell the truth as negative? Have we become a society that can no longer handle the truth? Are we so thin-skinned and apathetic that we just don’t want to be bothered by it?
I want you to know that sometimes my cartoons will show the ‘ugly truth’ about an issue, and that’s not being negative, that’s be honest. We need more of it in America.