The Whole Truth – by David Baldacci
Posted on 02. Feb, 2009 by M.L. Zupan in Book Reviews
David Baldacci – #1 New York Bestselling Author
It has been said that truth is stranger than fiction – if that is the case, then David Baldacci seems to have hit the nail right on the head with this spellbinding tale of ‘perception management’ in his book “The Whole Truth”.
Here is an excerpt from his book:
That’s why he’d hired Pender, who made the world believe what Creel wanted it to believe. It was often a war of attrition. You made up the truth and then buried the real thing under so much garbage that people grew weary of trying to dig through it and instead just accepted what you offered. It was the easy way out and humans were programmed to always go that way. After all, there were bills to pay, shopping to do, kids to raise, and sports to watch, so who had time for anything else?
Wow! What a powerful statement! Especially with Superbowl yesterday.
The book came out in April 2008 and yet as I read through it, many parts seemed as if they were jumping right out of the headlines of today. It was a high packed International thriller that kept me captivated until the last page. A megalomaniac shifting events in order to orchestrate a desired outcome versus a super-spy organization dedicated to eradicate evil whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.
It has a macho loner hero and a down-and-out female heroine hoping for a career comeback; lies, deceit, fights, twists and turns – and all the good earmarks of a Hollywood movie in the making.
But what of the concept of the book – this thing called ‘perception management’ or ‘PM’. What exactly is it?
The term perception management originates with the U.S. Military. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) offers this definition:
Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.
A PM Firm is a firm that sells the practices of perception management and writes truth for situations and companies and then sells that truth to the public.
David Baldacci writes in his Author’s Notes about PM firms:
PMs are not spin doctors because they don’t spin facts. They create facts and then sell them to the world as the truth. And that, to quote the venerable Mark Twain (who would’ve had a field day with the PM guys), is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.
If that doesn’t make you wonder how much of what we read today in the news is nothing more than ‘perception management’.
