Fraud - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/82/haunted

It's been happening a bit more with each of these older episodes, where there are disclaimers, now almost 20 years after these were originally aired, and that is the simple fact that a lot of these programs are fraudulent. They don't have quality original material, and instead have people lying about their lives and the amazing things that have happened in them. Instead of talking about their American lives, they made things up, and later were found out to be lying.

Now this is a tricky one because we've already covered an entire episode about lying, but seriously, how do you produce something for a national audience that's not true? Trust me, I understand the desire to get something produced with your name on it, something of value, something that will reach an audience larger than your own head and the voices inside of it, and I get that drive, but there has never been a point where I've said, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to lie about this so that people think it's interesting enough to read."

In a program like TAL all they do is talk about their lives, and what they've experienced as members of society. To try to lie about that isn't the same as making up a story about a fictional character, it's lying about the details of your own existence. How do you get to the point where you stop and think that no one is ever going to sit there and pause a moment to realize that what you're talking about, what you created, isn't even a single bit like your life? How is it that you're going to lie about your past, without thinking that maybe, just MAYBE someone out there from your past is going to be listening in and realize that you're lying about every single line of it and you have the details totally off?


I found it sort of ironic that in this episode talking about people haunting other people and acting like ghosts in their lives, that they included a story that turns out to not be true. It's ironic because the person that created that story was most likely haunted about his story that he created, with it looming over his head, constantly sitting there knowing that at any moment the bubble could burst and the truth would come out that what he created was a lie. His story about haunting most likely haunted him, and that weird sense of irony is super poetic, but it's also really frustrating because there are people that flat out lied to get the air time and publication opportunity that I would kill for.