The dangers of SELECTIVE TRUTH

On Sunday he tweeted a picture of students in a Thai classroom practising “Benjangkapradit” – the traditional salutation to a Buddha statue, using five parts of the body. Marshall captioned the photograph “Thai education is about producing slaves, not empowering people”. Once again, Marshall allowed fanaticism to get the better of him when it came to “the truth”. In reality, the picture showed youngsters being educated about a traditional Buddhist gesture practised around the world, not just in Thailand. It had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. 

In another tweet, Marshall posted a picture of General Prayut Chan-o-cha posing with kids on National Children’s Day and captioned it “Dictators love posting with children to make themselves look more human”. He seems to have forgotten the photographs of US presidential candidates holding babies that appear during every election. Or perhaps they are dictators, too. 

If there is a proper term to describe Marshall’s truth, it is “selective”. And a selective truth is no truth at all.

Marshall’s profession is journalism. He must know that truth and perception are two different types of information, and that sometimes they coincide and sometimes they are mutually exclusive. Every diligent journalist knows that this distinction is the most daunting challenge in information gathering that produces objective reports. Nuance and innuendo always threaten to creep in to a journalist’s point of view and his/her reports.

And that’s what happened with the so-called “truth” on Thailand Marshall delivered in his book, “The Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century”. 

The information that led him to believe he had a grip on the truth came in the Wikileaks cables containing American diplomats’ correspondence about Thailand, released in late 2010. The death of his Japanese colleague Hiro Muramoto earlier in 2010 during political violence in Bangkok seems to have been a petri dish that incubated his dislike for the Thai military and what he terms the powers behind their hubristic behaviour and impunity.

The problem with his stories is they were founded on presumption, not fact. Marshall never seemed to ask himself, as any good journalist would, if there might be another side of the story hidden by his own prejudice. As such, his book and many of his articles on Thailand amount to a set of unsubstantiated conspiracies, enforced by like-minded individuals who, harbouring their own personal grievances and vendettas, are bent on moulding facts to satiate their hatred of certain institutions. Their twisted epistemological logic seems to be, “If I think it is true, it is true; and darn it, I am right”.

This same attitude was invoked by US President Barack Obama to describe Ted Cruz – a hawkish Republican presidential candidate for 2018 – during his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year.

“Ted Cruz said that denying the existence of climate change made him like Galileo. Now that’s not really an apt comparison. Galileo believed the Earth revolves around the sun. Ted Cruz believes the Earth revolves around Ted Cruz.”

It is said that the biggest moral pitfalls on the path to truth are omission and selective evidence. Nick Davies of the Guardian recently noted that journalism was an industry whose task should be to filter out falsehood, but it has become a conduit for propaganda and second-hand news. 

While it is understandable that conscientious Western journalists fall victim to distance and unfamiliarity when it comes to writing about faraway countries like Thailand, it does not make it excusable. Marshall lived in Thailand for many years and he used that tenure to claim he knew the place better than many others. Unfortunately, that claim has proven to be false. He conveniently glossed over the wrongdoings, corruption and repression of politicians elected under so-called democratic regimes. He was more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and always hedged his accounts of them with a big “if”, especially when it came to corruption and abuse of power by an elected government. But he went full throttle on his harsh and presumptuous judgements of other Thai institutions. Apparently, investigative journalism was too much trouble.

Many years ago, as a journalist working in the US, I was called by a Central Intelligence Agency officer. He was angry about a story I had filed on the wars in Laos that involved the CIA. He told me that if he hadn’t been aware that I had no ulterior motive and no axes to grind, he would have sued me. Raising his voice, he told me that to be a good journalist, I should check my facts thoroughly before publishing. I was grateful for that lesson.

These days, with fierce media competition and the rise of the social media, sensational stories sell. And because there is never enough time to do exhaustive fact-checking, falsehoods are spread, and oftentimes taken as truth. 

As Mark Twain noted, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”