Is America becoming nation of liars?
Commentary by PAT MURPHY
Consider newspaper reporter Dennis Love and
health care giant HCA as symbols of the growing American social sickness.
They both confessed to being colossal liars
and cheats.
Love, a 30-something fast-track comer in
journalism, fabricated names he quoted during the presidential election
and acknowledged stealing phrases from other publications.
His Sacramento Bee editor promptly fired
him last month.
And then there’s the utterly disgraceful
case of HCA, the nation’s largest hospital operator.
HCA has confessed to a laundry list of
business crimes -- padding Medicare bills to the government and paying
kickbacks for patient referrals, to name just two -- and agreed to pay a
total of $840 million in civil and criminal penalties.
Let me repeat: the nation’s largest
hospital operator has confessed to cheating and agreed to pay $840 million
in fines, the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history.
What’s going on here?
Hospitals once were sanctified in American
culture as the ultimate exemplars of corporate honesty and integrity.
As for reporter Love’s lies, journalism
is nothing without honesty.
But neither reporter Love nor HCA are
rarities. U.S. culture is riddled with examples of cheating and lying. And
despite severe criminal and civil penalties, as well as damaged
reputations, new offenders try their hand in hopes of getting away with
it.
America has become a nation of liars.
Not a single American institution has
escaped. Televangelists have gone to jail for cheating and lying. Wall
Street is famous for corporate fraud. Ambitious journalists in TV have
fallen from their perches because of deceit in the work place. Medicine
and health care carry stains of dishonesty. The military has been
scandalized by cover-ups in high places.
Even teachers have admitted helping
students cheat on tests.
As for the U.S. presidency and Congress,
they’ve become repositories of lies and broken promises.
And on and on it goes.
The reasonable conclusion is that Americans
have lost their sense of ethics and honesty, and are numb to shame.
One common denominator in fraud, lying and
cheating is the driving ambition to succeed.
In the case of reporter Love and other
journalists who’ve lied, the greed for professional accolades and
promotions drove them to common dishonesty.
As for corporate giants such as HCA that
defraud customers and the government, executive greed for higher financial
profits that lead to huge multi-million dollar CEO bonuses surely is an
incentive.
Having cheated and been caught, the likes
of HCA and reporter Love are temporarily chastened.
HCA will dip into its reserves and pay the
penalties. In time, it’ll recover the fines with higher patient fees and
continue its reign as a profit-maker.
Reporter Love will take a career recess,
then pop up again with a cushy job, as other deceitful journalists have
done, probably with higher pay.
And for a public increasingly cynical about
whom to trust, it can count on other corporate giants and other
journalists being caught lying and cheating just as sure as it’ll hear
another Washington politician promise to selflessly do "what is right
for America" and not for politics.
