When I was growing up in England, sometime in the last century, history was one of my favorite subjects at school.
We were taught that William Caxton started the whole printing business, and that William Hogarth did for pictures what Caxton had done for words. Two Englishmen, it seemed, stood at the root of the technologies that got us where we are today.
Later in life I learned that some of those history books bent the truth a little, in favor of one party or another. Johannes Gutenberg, it turns out, invented the printing press. Caxton’s achievement was bringing it to England some thirty years later. I suspect that after the Second World War, British enthusiasm for celebrating German ingenuity was at an all-time low.
More puzzling still was what I learned about the Wars of the Roses. That was the fifteenth-century struggle between the House of Lancaster, with its red rose, and the House of York, with its white. Being from Lancashire, I was taught that the Red Rose prevailed over those loyal to the Duke of York.
We even learned and sang a little ditty in our earliest school years:
The Grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of a hill, and
Marched them down again…
And when he was up he was up
And when he was down he was down
And when he was only half way up, he was neither up nor down
Years later, in my business career, I had the great pleasure of working with a gent from Yorkshire (Hull, no less). Bob Stubbins indignantly informed me that his school textbooks named the White Rose as the victors.
All of that fighting happened more than five hundred years ago, and it has little bearing on life in the twenty-first century. It does show, though, that distorting the truth has been around for a very long time. So, the recent “fake news” phenomenon is nothing new.
What is new is the speed at which information travels, and the sheer number of media that can carry it, quite literally, into the palms of our hands.
As we hurtle towards a far from inconsequential election in the United States, I am saddened by how low political advertising has sunk. Judging by the plethora of disgusting attack ads, the truth plays no part in the hunt for that extra vote.
As a voter, I like to be informed. But it is getting ever harder to sift actual policy positions from the torrent of insults and lies the candidates are hurling at each other.
I hope you can sort the wheat from the chafe, and find a way to vote for the candidates that will best represent your interests.
As the public announcement jingle I remember from England says:
Vote, Vote, Vote…Because Your Vote Counts
I have voted.
If you are in the USA, hopefully you will honor your civic duty and exercise your franchise too.
And thank you to Wendy Sartory Link, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections and the great folks who staff the polling places for doing a great job in the midst of the maelstrom.