The Disappointing Truth

“They always disappoint, don’t they?” observes Josiah Hembley, head of Media Studies at the Kalamazoo Institute of Midwifery in an interview with the Michigan Meat Packers Journal, to publicise his new book, The Disappointing Truth.  “The ‘big reveals’ in scandals and long-running news stories, that is.  The media always builds this stuff up, teasing the prospect of future revelations, while dropping salacious scraps of inconclusive information, giving the impression that this is all leading up to some kind of spectacular denouement.  Like a TV soap opera, or a thriller movie.  And, of course, we lap it all up, just as we do those TV shows and films, buying in to all the drama along the way as a substitute for the excitement that is missing in our own real lives.”  But, the media expert notes, in these long-running news scandals, just like in real life, we never seem to get the big pay off.  Instead, it all seems to fizzle out disappointingly.  “Take the Epstein scandal – we’ve had so many documents released in recent months, following years of hints and teasing from both Trump and his opponents as to who is going to get burned by the inevitable breaking of the scandal when everything comes out,” says the academic.  “Yet, in truth, despite all the stuff released, all the pictures and e-mails, that smoking gun never seems to appear.  The ‘Holy Grail’ of evidence which will point the finger at Trump, or anyone else for that matter, stubbornly refuses to materialise.  Everything is circumstantial.”

The only major casualty so far, Hembley points out, has been the former Prince Andrew and even there the evidence has been pretty much circumstantial.  “Despite all the current talk of criminal investigations, so far nothing sufficiently concrete to warrant such action has been exposed,” he says. “His downfall has purely been the result of the reputational damage his association with Epstein has caused the Royal Family, rather than due to any hard and fast evidence of his sexual misconduct. Again, it seems to be all tease and no substance.” But such is the nature of this sort of stuff, Hembley notes, it isn’t just confined to political scandals like the Epstein business.  “The media loves to push those narratives about how the US government has access to alien technology from crashed UFOs, or that the UK government has reams of files devoted to UFO incursions into British airspace, which it  suppressed to prevent public panic,” he says.  “With each story they hint that astounding revelations are about to break: that dead aliens are about to be revealed, that files are going to be released showing that Harold Wilson held meetings with aliens in 1968 or that the US will roll a complete flying saucer out of the hangers at Area 51.  Yet all we get are the same tired old stories from the same tired old cranks about how they met a man from Rigel while working in a top secret US lab, or how they were taken on a ride around Mars in an alien spaceship – all with absolutely no evidence to back them up.  The big pay off just never comes.”

Could it be that the continued failure for these stories to adequately resolve themselves is intentional? Are they part of an artificial narrative constructed by shady top-level government operatives? That’s the theory that Hembley has set out in his new book . “The reality is that all of this shit, all the apparent conspiracies and secrets and unresolved mysteries, are just fabrications of a shadowy global elite,” he explains. “They exist in order to distract us from the reality of what is going on in the world. I mean, who is going to be worried about, say, Trump’s corruption, or the long-term economic and humanitarian effects of the war against Iran, when they are constantly having the prospect of salacious sexual misconduct revelations, or alien contact, dangled in front of them?” These elites, he contends, represent the vastly wealthy individuals who actually own the media, industry, commerce and consequently control politicians through their economic influence. “They don’t want the average person to realise just how evil and self-interested they are,” says Hembley. “And the fact is that they don’t have to fool everybody – there will always be a significant minority who see through them, but, in truth, the majority of people are naive and gullible individuals who don’t really want to know about the horrible reality of the world and would instead prefer to escape into these conspiracies.”

Obviously, in order to keep their distraction going, the narratives constructed by these elites and disseminated via the media platforms they own, can never come to an actual conclusion. There can never be a pay off, otherwise they would no longer be able to string their audience along. “Naturally, some of these narratives eventually fall by the wayside, as people lose interest, or the participants die or fade from prominence,” contends Hembley. “Which is why there is a constant trickle of new narratives bubbling up in the media, from scares about Workd War Three to rumoured new deadly pandemics. It’s a never ending cycle of lies.” Hembley points to the re-election of Donald Trump as US president and the fourteen years of venal and incompetent Tory governments that the UK kept re-electing, as proof of just how effective these false narratives are at distracting large swathes of the public from the reality of what is going on in their own countries.

Other commentators, however, disagree with all of Hembley’s conclusions.  “I’m afraid that the cynic in me says that this weaving of never resolved narratives has less to do with distracting people from reality, than keeping up sales and viewing figures,” opines Royston Triblock, a media analyst from Britain’s West Ealing Postal University. “If one of these tales ever reached a satisfactory conclusion, then the story would effectively be dead and the cash cow it represented for the media carrying it choked off. It’s that simple.” Franklin Posster, a former national newspaper columnist from Manchester, believes that the never-concluding narratives may actually be designed to protect the public from reality. “Take the whole alien conspiracy narrative, for instance,” he muses. “Now, if it was ever revealed that our governments were in contact with the representatives of alien civilisations, then the public perception of them would be fundamentally altered. Suddenly, there would be lots of stuff about how the aliens are getting a State Visit and meeting the King at Buckingham Palace, but that would draw them into the world of the ordinary, making them concrete presences, rather than some tantalising, shadowy mystery which sells papers.  Because that’s the draw of these things – the mystery.”  All mysteries, when solved, he argues, are somewhat disappointing.  “In contrast to fiction, for instance, murders are inevitably motivated by greed, jealousy, passion or are heat of the moment incidents, the result of rage, drugs or alcohol.  Or some combination of the three.  Either that, or they are the work of a psychopath who, in contrast to movie psychos, has unfathomable motives and looks more like a mumbling tramp than a sophisticated professional like Hannibal Lecter,” he says.  “As with everything else, the fantastic fantasy versions are always far more exciting and interesting than the mundane reality.  Which is probably why so many people seem to like conspiracy theories.”