GLEANING TRUTH IN MEDIA: Tankman and the Tiananmen Square

Ah truth. There is only one truth... or is there?

In the information age, one with ambition is not short of multiple mediated sources of knowledge. There are books, videos, blogs, memes, .pdfs... People seem to have a greater trust in books than most other mediums -- clearly we feel safer trusting something that has stood the test of time. As often as books are quoted and as literate as it makes one sound -- that, in and of itself, does not make something true.

The medium does not dictate truth. The truth is just as likely or unlikely to come in book form as it is from the lips of a stranger, perhaps from a late night Youtube session. What we do have to do is sift through much of what we find and decide what is true. Like a constantly tested hypothesis, truth exists until it is unseated or updated by new information. Whether wholly new or just slightly altered, it is something new... and exciting.

The truth was only ever just another's account of something -- first hand being the best, but hard to come by. You remember the childhood game called telephone? It was pretty amazing how different a sentence can become after being whispered into 12 different ears by 12 different mouths. A profound lesson indeed.

As seekers of knowledge we find multiples of the same story with different outcomes, conclusions or facts. When we are diligent, we fact check and we cross reference and many of us have our trustworthy author's from whom we quote or confirm what we already know.

Of immense power, perhaps the greatest weapon the world has ever known is that of the mass media. It carries a considerable weight in terms of authenticity and in fact, more people believe it than those who distrust it. Sad indeed. Probably many of us here on Steemit have not been able to get a friend or loved one to believe our version of something which they had already had their minds made up by the mediated version. It's tough to put up your dukes in such a fight, as often as I do -- I often lose. In the case of Tankman and the widely mediated Tiananmen Square Protest, I have a first-hand accounting of events -- told of course, second-hand.

In early June of 1989, there was pro-democracy protest going hot in Beijing. 10,000 Chinese troops and at least a long line of tanks took to the square to quell the demonstration. As a row of tanks attempted to move beyond a protestor, he turned and with a square jaw, faced them down. His upright posture dared the tank driver's to run him down.

This iconic image which has been seen by millions of people. It stands as THE symbol for the revolutionary spirit, for a contemporary David and Goliath -- for courage and conviction in the face of the mightiest sword the Communist Chinese could brandish. All he had to do was let them drive right on past him, but no, he could not take it -- not one more bit of it.

When I was a student at Temple University studying film and photography -- I had a professor who was buddies with a correspondent​ who was sent to cover the growing protest in Beijing. During his stay there he noted that there were many homeless men and women living in Tiananmen Square. It had been told to him that most of the homeless in the square were previous tenants of a psychiatric hospital which closed down suddenly, leaving many of its patients to fend for themselves. Which they did, and so did Tankman. Tankman was not a revolutionary, he was crazy.

Do you notice the bags in his hands? One is the flimsy plastic type you get from a grocery store and the other is darker... I think a duffel bag. He puts them both in his left hand for a bit, but he ends up transferring one of them back to his right hand.

For those that live in the city, you are familiar with homeless men carrying around bags similar to the ones we see in Tankman's hands. You might wonder why a revolutionary would have these 2 bags in his hands at this particular moment. He most likely wasn't shopping just before this photo, besides that wouldn't explain the duffel bag.

It's quite obvious now that he is not who the media claims him to be. His actions look crazy, because they are. Part of the photo/video not often shown is Tankman getting on top of the tank. Now he looks really crazy.

Here is a longer and more neutral version of the incident.

Does it matter if his legacy is untrue? Although Tankman is a pop icon, for something he didn't do, certainly there were others on that day or the days leading up to this that did essentially, what Tankman did. Does it matter that Tankman stole their thunder? Do you think the media new about Tankman and continued to sell the story?

Tankman still has not been identified.