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Rather Authentic
The curtain is coming down this week on Dan Rather as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he’d like you to remember him as being authentic. Good luck to him – and many others. In a recent Ken Auletta article in The New Yorker, Rather said, “The one thing I hope and I believe, is that even my enemies think I’m authentic.” In America today, too much time is expended on wishing for authenticity; or, better put, working to manufacture authenticity. Leaders and organizations that are purportedly civic-minded engage in endless posturing in order to suggest to people that they “care” about you and understand your reality. As Frank Rich pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, Rather’s competitor, Brian Williams, the newly-installed anchor at NBC News, has adopted the slogan “Reporting on America’s Story.” It is NBC’s way of signaling that they understand us – they’re on our side. No more of that silly news. But why can’t people simply let their true words and deeds speak for themselves? Why must they tell us they are being authentic? What all this hoopla amounts to is a vacuous attempt to connect in a world in which people’s reality is constantly distorted in the pursuit of one’s own narrow agenda. And let’s face it: in so many of these efforts, authenticity is not the goal at all; manipulation is. The bottom line is to make someone believe that you are real; actually being real is beside the point, if not a hopeless endeavor. More than ten years ago I wrote a report entitled, Meaningful Chaos, which revealed how and why people form relationships with public concerns. One of the key factors involved was something we called “authenticity.” People formed attachment to public concerns when there were three standards of authenticity met (which we have since added to). The standards went far beyond people merely insisting that their own personal prejudices be reaffirmed by what they see, read, or hear.
- People want discussions of public concerns to reflect a base sense – which the current level of sensationalism in news coverage and public discourse often undermines.
- People want information sources to reflect an understanding of their experiences and values – and yet such experiences and values often seem dismissed as ‘soft,” “fluffy,” and “unreliable” in today’s rational world.
- People want to be squared with, told the straight story about things – but, such candor is hard to find in public life today.