It is embarrassing, and a bit perplexing -- and admittedly a bit satisfying -- to watch the Coca-Cola Co. twist in the wind. Phony declarations of "bringing people together" will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that will come in the form of a mob. P.R. palaver won't generate sympathy. Honesty will. The time has come for radical truth.

Lance Armstrong appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network to explain 20 years of cheating, lying and cruel personal destruction of his truthful critics. Although he apologized for his conduct, he left the distinct impression that he was sorry mainly for getting caught. And his claim that he did not force his teammates into doping, among other continued denials, sounds like a crock.

Yum Brands Inc., a company that for decades has been serially dishonest with its customers about the relative healthfulness of its products, is now under suspicion of pulling a fast one on China. According to "The Wall Street Journal," in 2010 and 2011, Yum submitted chicken samples to government testing agencies that contained unlawful levels of antibiotics. The question is whether the company then took corrective action, or covered its tracks and continued to purchase chicken from the two poultry suppliers where the samples originated.

The media are awash in gratuitous violence -- just as they were in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Countless dime novels, broadcasts, comic books and movies titillated audiences with gunplay and body counts -- resulting somehow in vanishingly few actual mass shootings of actual flesh-and-blood Americans. And why? Because guns were harder to come by.