Word: sissela
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...second lecture, "Truthfulness and Deceit in Public Life," will feature Sissela Bok, who is a fellow in the department of population and international health at the Center for Population and Development Studies...
...wiser? If voters heard the words second- or thirdhand, how could they judge them? Now it's impossible to fib in obscurity. Americans can already mouth the words when they see the incessant reruns of that finger-jabbing image: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Sissela Bok, the high priestess of the scholars of lying, says the TV camera has made it far more dangerous for a President to prevaricate than it was 50 years ago. Now it's the camera that doesn...
...nothing of kids, who have a harder time distinguishing real from vicarious. (And on some TV shows--say, Cops--there is no difference.) These studies were primarily completed before the spread of cable, Nintendo and the Internet into many a 14-year-old's bedroom. As social critic Sissela Bok writes in her new book Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment: "These sources bring into homes depictions of graphic violence...never available to children and young people in the past...
...ratings shoot sky-high, and the viewers use their remote controls and zap from station to station. They watch them," says Perret. Explains Manhattan psychologist Steven Fishman: "A lot of people have pent-up emotions, so it's cathartic for them to observe such violent action." But, says Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Harvard: "That just shows that the lines between news and entertainment have become very blurred." Former TV news producer Derwin Johnson, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, is appalled. "It's a classic case of technology running the beast instead of a clear editorial...
Many people who falsify their experience, says author Sissela Bok, rationalize that "it helps me and it hurts nobody." They do not think about the qualified person who didn't get the job, the book contract, the government appointment. You have to wonder about the state of mind of the already successful people who lie when they know how easy it is to be tripped up. Are they self-loathers who want to bring themselves down, knowing they would get found out sooner or later anyway? Or are they overtaken by grandiosity, the need to be at the center...