ATTENTION BP, GOLDMAN SACHS, ET ALL! ALL WE WANT IS THE TRUTH!

These stories dominated the news in just the past few weeks…..UCLA student gets abducted, but wait; she turns up at a police station and we find out that not only was she not abducted, but she hadn’t been a student a UCLA for the past two years. Apparently, her parents were planning a graduation party and well, she couldn’t bear to tell them the truth so she ran away and concocted the abduction story as a cover-up…..Another “college” student lies his way into Harvard, and almost a writing gig with the New Republic, that is, until he gets caught…..Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal claimed he was a Viet Nam vet, but when he was called out by the press, he admitted he didn’t actually serve in Viet Nam, but nonetheless continues to spin the tale to the point that he has effectively turned an almost sure Senate seat into a toss-up race…..the tres stooges’ at BP, Halliburton and Trans Ocean point the finger at each other as a Senate hearing tries to find out who was responsible for the BP leak… and so on and so on.

This type of news has Goldman Sachs breathing a sigh of relief because it was just a few weeks ago that their CEO Lloyd Blankmind, I meant to say Blankfein, and his boy wonder Fabrice “Fab” Tourre were tap dancing around the truth during a Senate Subcommittee hearing on their role in the financial meltdown. These guys had more memory lapses than the two clueless stars in Dude Where’s My Car? Note to BP and Goldman Sachs: not taking responsibility for your actions sometimes ends up as bad as lying, at least in the court of public opinion.

I’m hardly the first to cast a stone, but it is fascinating to me how untruths can turn a little spark into a media firestorm. In the past six months it seems every other week there was another Tiger Woods, Jesse James or John Edwards scenario where a celebrity caught in some sort of discrepancy or incident, tells a whopper to try and get out, and then gets tangled up in a web of lies until their house of cards tumbles. Maybe it’s the proliferation of 24/7 media where a poor girl who lies to her parents garners media coverage like she was, well Tiger Woods. Andy Warhol was a true visionary when he said in the future, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” - but I have to believe that’s not the type of fame most of us seek or want (although anyone who watches YouTube might tend to disagree). But the message is still clear - the truth eventually will come out so why lie in the first place if it only makes matters worse? David Letterman got caught with his “worldwide” pants down (literally) and immediately offered the true story to his audience of millions. And guess what? It became a non-story except between his wife and himself. The story quickly went away along with his accuser Robert “Joe” Halerman who got caught in an implausible lie, and pleaded guilty to extortion with a six-month sentence.  

 
When I was a youngster, my mother use do tell me something her mother told her, “Don’t lie, because once you do, you will have to tell more lies and at some point you will forget the original lie and contradict yourself and get caught. On the other hand, you will never forget the truth.” Words of wisdom because the worst kind of lies are the ones that hurt someone else and the more one tries to cover up, the deeper the hurt. I consider myself to be a branding specialist, not actually in public relations, but when you look at the damage each one of these people has inflicted on a spouse, friend, client, or in the case of BP, the environment which affects us all, the more you realize that the real victims of the lies are the liars themselves.  

Coda: In grade school, Baby Boomers were uniformly taught the story of our first president George Washington as a young boy bravely admitting to doing a bad deed. “I cannot tell a lie - I cut down the cherry tree.” I don’t know how many history classes still teach that, but as we found out later, that story never happened. But even if it was meant to be a fable, it still speaks the truth because the consequences of lying are even worse. It seems at least David Letterman was paying attention.