It could be stated that Americans have become too cynical to expect much truth in what they read, hear, or watch.

Several recent events have brought to light the decay of integrity around us.

The US Army just confirmed that thousands of soldiers have been cheating on online tests for promotions. Consequently, it will have to spend millions of dollars to revise these correspondence courses.

The British magazine Nature recently reported that a new scanning program they are using has identified 76 cases of outright plagiarism among professors (not students) of biomedicine. Consequently, the study’s entire database of articles is now on a public website for peer review.

There is evidence that people do still care about integrity, however.

Antiplagiarism software is growing in popularity. Ethics courses abound in business schools and character education is popular in classrooms. How about those “truth boxes” published by the media that find mischaracterizations and even campaign fibs? There have also been firings for bogus credentials in academia and business reported in recent years.

Bottom line – both as individuals and a society as a whole, we lose our bearings and our foundation when we compromise on truth.