“Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor. The prosecutor said he was forced out for leading a corruption probe into Hunter Biden's company.”
another source, in this case the ny times, would be equally free to publish the statement:
“Vice President Biden was overseeing American policy toward Ukraine at the time, and he did push for the removal of the country’s top prosecutor, who was seen as corrupt or ineffectual by the United States and Western European governments. But there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden or the oligarch who owns Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.”
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ewarren/status/118301988086768025...
> The prosecutor said he was forced out for leading a corruption probe into Hunter Biden's company
> there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden
It’s entirely fair to report what the prosecutor said provided it’s clearly attributed as it was here.
You’re free to draw your own conclusion that the prosecutor is possibly lying.
The problem is that it doesn't only matter that stated facts are correct; it matters also that people reading them interpret them correctly. Natural language is messy; people jump to conclusions also because often we do communicate intentionally by hiding meaning between the lines.
> It’s also allowed for different sides of things, because you can interpret things like socioeconomic statistics and facts differently and write about them as such, but you can’t make up things.
But maybe my English wasn’t good enough to carry it through.
I don’t think narratives are a problem as such. People are allowed different opinions in a free society. Our laws are there to prevent people from printing things that are outright false, but these laws are being circumvented on the modern media platforms because they apply to editiorial staff but not private citizens.
Which is a problem in a world where influencers have more viewers than news papers.
Obviously you can still manipulate real facts and tell a lie (like the classic photo cropping example): that should be prohibited as well.