I blame Nixon. And Lew Grade.
Until Watergate, everyone believed their government was up to no good, but they could never quite prove it. You can hardly blame anyone for buying into the Kennedy conspiracy. And when JFK’s younger brother and Martin Luther King were felled by assassins’ bullets within months of each other in 1968, the public could be forgiven for believing they were bit players in a Hollywood movie. There was no doubting who the bad guys were.
Then Woodward and Bernstein had to go and publish evidence that the government were, after all, the bad guys. The cultural message was received loud and clear throughout the world. Official cover-ups have become such a central part of our entertainment industry that it is now simply not on to suggest that conspiracies are more fiction than fact.
Then there was Capricorn One (you were wondering when Lew Grade would come into it, weren’t you?), and suddenly the media were giving publicity to brain-addled hippies who had proved that Apollo had been faked using evidence procured by going through Buzz Aldrin’s bins.
Today, the front page of the Daily Mail proclaims that just one in five people believe the official story that Dr David Kelly committed suicide. When I was studying journalism I was taught that when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When most people believe that the official story is hiding foul play, I’m afraid I see that as a dog biting a man. People want to believe in conspiracies because in doing so, they make life much more interesting than it actually is. More like a movie, in fact. And who wouldn’t want to live in that glamorous world instead of this one?
