The Truth is one of my favorite Discworld because it centers on an issue that I am always interested in debating with people: the public good.
The public good in this case is the right of the public to be informed, about their government, about the powers that be, whatever. As advocated by William de Worde, the public has the right to know what’s going on–even if they’re more interested in reading about elf abductions and Lancre women giving birth to snakes than they are about the Patrician’s case.
Because the media is a new form of information in Ankh-Morpork, people don’t really know who it’s responsible to. William says he’s responsible to the Truth. But the people who he quotes aren’t at all comfortable about that. The running joke is William writing down what people say to annoy them and having them reply, “Is he allowed to do that?”
William often gets questioned by the Patrician and Commander Vimes of the Watch about the nature of information and the real consequences of an informed public. After all, if you tell the people the government is committing heinous crimes, they might riot; they might revolt. The truth, in theory, shall set you free. But I rather like the misprint in The Truth, “The Truth shall make ye fret.”
My take on all this is, telling the public everything may be overkill, it may cause a lot of problems, but it beats the alternative. Once you start selecting what the people can and cannot know, the government and other organizations may not be held as accountable as they are. After all, someone has to know that a crime has been committed before something can be done about it. Also, there’s that thorny issue of who gets to decide? Given what I know about human nature, the person who gets to decide what people can know will probably decide to hide whatever makes them look bad and will spread the stuff that makes them look good.
So, funny book, deep issues.