This article is a soup of crisscrossing claims and motives, but after thinking that, I realize that's what the news is actually like, and whenever it appears otherwise, it's because of narrative-building.
The fundamental premise of journalism as "writing the first draft of history" (in the best-faith interpretation) is that most significant things that happen are a confluence of conflicting claims, motivations, and understandings of circumstance and context. The work of the journalist is to piece those conflicts into a coherent essay such that a reader outside of the context of an event can piece together a mental model for actionable decisions relative to the event.
I can't really tell if that is 100% true, but I think it might be. I think confirmation bias could be looked at through this lens. We have an internal story that makes sense to us, and we tend to give more weight to data that fits our internal story (narrative) and discard the rest.
I don't know really, I'm more thinking out loud here than trying to present The Truth.
That's interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
It's also worth nothing that false claims made by important people are historically significant, but a paper that's trying to build a cohesive narrative but lacked the ability to outright quote something and call it false (for cultural reasons, stating the author's position on a quote is considered too aggressively opinionated for something published in the news section of a paper), would probably choose not to report the quotes.
I factually believe Lindell is a hustling liar, but just because that's true in general, doesn't mean that everything he says or presents is fabricated.
Part of a scheme to misrepresent? Almost assuredly, but however unlikely, it's possible he might have uncovered some legit China attempt to interfere in something, after all, we know they do that. So it's a matter of perspective and context.
A little bit of historical context is really important, but I think we need to be careful about it.
This article in particular is very confusing and poorly written sadly.
>“We were handed a turd,” he said. “And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that’s what I think we did.”
That claim states that the data was terrible, but someone thinks they found something good in it.
>“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium.
This makes it sound like nothing good was found.
>He had offered $5 million to any in-person attendee who can disprove his claims. The offer is no longer on the table, Mr. Merritt said.
This claims that the $5M is not on the table right now.
>Kurt Olsen, a lawyer on Mr. Lindell’s team said there were multiple sources of the data that Mr. Lindell claims to have, and did not confirm that Mr. Mongtomery was the source of the data. He also clarified that the $5 million challenge has not been canceled and that Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information.
This claims that it is.
He's talking about the nature of communication, not about the actual underlying facts of whether the data is gibberish or not.
We know what happened in the election. We know roughly how well the vaccines are working and how safe they are. That's not the problem, the problem is how the information is presented, communicated, how clearly repudiated evidence can still be perpetuated as 'evidence'.
In particular, the OP's point about how there are contradicting statements in the article is really interesting: this should be common as there are a lot of disagreements in the real world, and yet, we don't really see a lot of that in most journalism which betrays the fact that it's likely a lot of journalists are actually advocating for an idea, and selecting the quotes necessary to make that case. Which is more common than not.
I have to admit personally being confused by the apparent duplicity of the quotes ... and it took me a minute to realize that this was actually valuable information, that we rarely see.
Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information"
None of those claims contradict each other, the article is saying "This person said this, another said this" and is showing the absolute chaos and buffonery that Mike Lindell and "team" are doing.
>Merritt says it's off the table, but Kurt Olsen says it's still on the table and that "Mr. Merritt would not be privy to that information"
Those two claims contradict each other, but the paper is reporting them accurately. The fact that people are having so much trouble parsing this goes to show the extent to which we have become accustomed to newspaper editorialization. :-)