Playing Catch Up

It’s not that you can’t handle the truth. It’s that you can’t catch it. In today’s news cycle, even some of the biggest stories come and go in the blink of an eye. Things weren’t always that way. I came of age during the Nightline era (before CNN launched 24 TV news) when Ted Koppel remade the news landscape, covering the Iran hostage crisis for 444 days. One story. The same story. Every night. During the early days, Koppel’s show was called The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. And we were, by a news story. The story we watched nightly ended with a suspicious twist. The US hostages, whose 444-day ordeal was an anvil weighing down Jimmy Carter’s presidency, were released from Iran on the exact day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. We’ve now learned that what many suspected was probably true. NYT (Gift Article): A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election. “‘History needs to know that this happened,’ Ben Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. ‘I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.'” They say a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Maybe the truth should switch to track shoes.