Sorry, I still think I am right about the media rarely lying
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
Trying to use a definition of lying that means only making false statements is not a proper definition. There is a big difference between someone who makes a false statement that they genuinely believe at the time and someone who makes a completely true statement but has omitted certain details in order to deceive the listener. The first person is simply mistaken and hopefully will correct themselves with more knowledge. The second example is someone who is using words to manipulate an outcome by getting someone to believe what is ultimately an untruth. It is completely possible to say only true things and be a liar.
"A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies." ― Alfred Tennyson
Intent-based analysis is not useful, because you can't know the intent and also the intent doesn't make any difference as to what the effect will be - that well-intended source can have the same or worse misleading effect as an ill-intended source, and the distinction between well-intended vs ill-intended is also in the eyes of the beholder.
For example, a lot of Covid reporting really annoyed me, on both sides. One side would say "Here's facts A and B; see, the vaccine is working!". The other side would say "Here's facts C and D; see, the vaccine is killing people!". Over and over again. What we needed was the article that said "Here's A, B, C, and D, all together, and the reasonable conclusion is that the vaccine is harming some people and helping others, and the benefits outweigh the harm"... or whatever. But I'd never see that article. I'd see one side picking the data that made their side look good, and completely ignoring all data that didn't. And the same from the other side.
It was very obvious (and frustrating) with Covid. But Covid isn't the only issue where that happens. Try to find an article on abortion that regards the fetus as genuinely human, yet still advocates for abortion rights. Or that acknowledges the harm and strain to the mother, while still advocating for restricting abortion. They may exist, but they're really rare. The sides are too busy yelling "my body, my choice" (as if the fetus either didn't exist or were a part of the mother's body) or "baby killers" (as if there were no consequences to the mother).
In none of these situations can you give all relevant information. Nobody's got time and attention for that. But you can try to come close, or you can try to only present the parts that make your side look right (and not just right, but obviously right, so that no other position could be reasonable).
They're publishing true things, but not the truth. And the true things they're publishing, they're doing so with the intent of propaganda.
Yeah, I think it's fair to call that lying. And no, that doesn't mean that everything is a lie.
Here’s the first example I found: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/health/cdc-vaccine-heart-...
I agree that this was important but am baffled how you missed the many articles like that in mainstream news sources (NPR, NYT, Washington Post, etc.), as well as the various scientists and public health experts who wrote blog posts digging into those discussions.
And, more importantly, this kind of rhetoric or definition doesn't help anything, even if there is a clear definition which there isn't one. It's the cynicism, without any use.
Keeping it as simple as possible, we take Fact A. If we're talking about a specific fact (in this case, Fact A) then to state Fact A and assert its validity/soundness/truth etc is not to lie.
If the subject is not Fact A, but Fact A is is given to support a certain other position/fact with regards to the subject and you know that to say Fact A without Fact B (C, D…) will give a misleading impression about the subject then you are, indeed, lying.
I think another reasonable counterexample is Jussie Smollett's catastrophe, where any fleeting scrutiny whatsoever would tell you that it was fiction, but the media failed to question even the most ridiculous story and ran with the false narrative for weeks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covington-kid-nicholas-sandm...
Basically, the news was just reporting what someone said, so no foul.
> He objected to widely-reported statements by Phillips to the effect that Sandmann had "blocked" him and "would not allow him to retreat."
> But the judge said that these are "objectively unverifiable" and so can only count as opinion, which is unactionable in this case, as it is protected speech.
> Bertelsman also said: "The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips's first-person view of what he experienced.
> "This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident."
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-rules-that-being-cal...
There is a reason the majority of the public distrusts the mainstream media. Mainstream media outlets are inveterate liars.
Almost always it is an highly curated set of facts; often intentionally designed to mislead people.
The author is not pushing the idea that the media is honest, rather that the way we describe their dishonesty is inaccurate.
My personal interpretation is that as long as you say factually true things you are sort of protected both on defamation and ethics claims.
The industry was legitimately overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. They benefited from a toxic and obsessive audience for years. Then their audience turned on them (for a mix of legitimate and illegitimate reasons), but the industry players were the ones who held the microphone. They got to define the story as they saw it - and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing.
And now that toxic ball of highly-technical male youths have grown into a political entity that has too much time on their hands and distrusts media and victim narratives as a rule.
But their targets were also just ultimately, not worth it. They were mediocre people putting out mediocre product that would have gotten consigned to the dustbin of humanity had they been left alone.
It was just a bunch of mediocre shitheads not able to accept the reality that they were mediocre shitheads.
Not to mention, after a while, after finding out more about everything in general, the real irony is that just about every industry is overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. Like what went on with regards to kickoff Gamergate was relatively tame compared to just the past month vis a vis FTX/Alameda.
We take for granted that "professional streamer" is now a thing. The content creator industry is a little less centralized, and that took pressure away.
If your goal is to help people understand media better, they do need to know that most media deception is accomplished by simply avoiding relevant facts rather than voicing outright falsehoods. In other words, as a media consumer, your primary question should be, "What are they not telling me?" This is why it helps to multi-source your news.
That is a very instructive lesson to learn - something we should teach kids in school, really.
At a certain point you're just creating evidence out of thin air, like a crappy magician's trick.
Nobody is claiming that there isn't a major problem, just that one proposed solution is fundamentally misguided.
One small reference: https://gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolat...
But they’re wrong! Read the articles! The one Vermillion linked is FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook. It’s discussing an FBI crime statistics report for the year the Sandy Hook shooting happened. The report lists zero murders in the town of Sandy Hook that year; Infowars thinks this means the shooting was fake.
According to Wikipedia, the FBI report is real and does in fact list zero deaths for Sandy Hook. They say the shooting was investigated by Connecticut state police instead of Sandy Hook local police, and since the FBI crime statistics are based on local police reports, it didn’t include the shooting.
This is such bullshit. There is a world of difference between 'FBI report does not list any deaths at Sandy Hook' (a factually true statement hat might mean different things to different readers) and 'FBI says no-one killed at Sandy Hook.' I call bullshit because the writer is no fool and understands the difference between an omission and a positive assertion (of absence or non-existence). It's really disappointing to see a person of obvious intelligence with a significant following resort to such specious arguments rather than just qualify or venture beyond their original assertion.
tl;dr sophistry masquerading as objectivity.
The CDC's own official numbers drastically reduce the number of COVID deaths, or conflate them with other illnesses.
You could read the CDC page, and come to such conclusions, and write articles about them (and people did, and linked to those CDC pages even). However, to come away with this conclusion, you would have to ignore the lower part of the page titled, "Understanding the numbers", which goes into why and how they split up numbers due to co-morbidity. (i.e. Official cause of death might be pneumonia, but you most likely wouldn't have had a fatal case of pneumonia without COVID, not unlike cancer also causing a lot of pneumonia deaths.)
By this author's logic, these breathless articles aren't lying about the COVID numbers, they are just "missing context".
Intentionally misinterpreting CDC data, which is easily explained further on down the page, with the assumption that your readers will be too lazy and dumb to scroll down and read and/or understand it is fucking lying, and not incomplete context.
The author of course is making the point that censorship will always be hard, because people can make the argument that they are just reporting the facts. But the story is a simple one in some ways: It didn't used to be hard, because news media was trusted by the public because they exercised good editorial controls. The public trusted them, because they did a good enough job with it. The public lost that trust because they started to loosen standards due to declining revenues as a result of the internet.
The problem of censorship will be solved when somebody figures out a business model for news which makes news media profitable enough to operate with the same editorial standards, and not having to resort to clickbait for ad views. This is the hard part to solve, but if you solve that, the hyper-partisan and fringe news sites will start to lose eyeballs. Currently, the mainstream media is incentivized to be dishonest, and people rightfully have lost trust in them (creating the fringe ecosystem where people seek out news sources which just cater to what they want to hear, or whatever is most stimulating).
Or, to summarize, censorship (or as we used to call it, "honest news") in our current media ecosystem is hard because you impact your profits, and people don't want to do it. A systemic fix is what is needed.
Lying: "The sky is hi-vis yellow"
Also lying: "Under Biden's EPA—can you believe this, folks?—the sky is blue. Here with us today is a scientist and fellow with the Bullshit Institute for Mercenary Science who will tell us why blue is the worst color for the sky to be, and Paul Ryan to tell us how bad this will be for American families."
The latter is a pattern that a lot of Fox News stories follow, to single out just one set of—yes!—liars; omit the context that it's entirely normal for the sky to be blue, suggest that it's a new thing that's a scheme of the current bogeyman and not long-standing policy, and don't even check to see if there are good reasons it's the way it is (or if you do know any, certainly don't mention them). Like, you can sit there and spot these (perhaps with the aid of a smartphone) all day long watching that channel—hey, gotta do something to stay entertained at the parents' house when they leave the damn TV on, tuned to cable news, all day every day, making conversation difficult. Seriously, it's constant, and my made-up version does condense the process but isn't an exaggeration (check out their extensive coverage of "secret nighttime illegal immigrant flights" for an example of the real deal—there was at least one day when that seemed like all they wanted to talk about, and it was a made-up story in exactly this fashion, but was being covered heavily even on the "real news" portions of their programming).
These cases are lies.
They go beyond making a case for one side, to turning a non-story into a story through lies of omission, entirely on purpose. That's lying. No need to make up facts, in order to lie.
("I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts." Yes, sure, OK, but the headline is wrong and he surely knows it—one might say it's a lie. Nb I usually like Slate Star Codex pieces quite a bit, and this one isn't even overall bad, but it's framed more click-baitily than it would be if it were honest, and people going "well ackshually nothing they said was technically false so it's not a lie" is the kind of incorrect pedantry that drives me up a wall)
It's akin to what's known as "JAQ'ing off". Is the vaccine going to kill you? Are illegal immigrants coming to kill you for your job? Is Obama a secret Muslim lizard? I don't know, I'm Just Asking Questions.
You'll never pin these people down on a concrete opinion. You'll never get them to say with certainty what they believe. They'll just say they're curious about the "official narrative". They just want to know "what really happened".
And, of course, the answer is never that the "official narrative" is correct. That always needs to be questioned. Always doubt. And always attack those who ever think that maybe something is just as simple and mundane as a guy on a shooting spree in an elementary school.
Same thing with COVID regarding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. We always need more research, more questioning. No matter how many times neither worked for COVID. We just needed to try again because one guy said it worked kinda one time. And we just gotta try anything. Anything at all except the things that are actually working because the big, mean "establishment" is promoting those.
Just question, never commit.
At some point, you are responsible for the questions you ask, how long you keep asking them, and the ones you never do.
True enough, but a useful perspective I've heard when it comes to arguing with people online: You're not arguing for the benefit of the person you're arguing, you're arguing for the benefit of the people paying attention to the argument.
It's easy enough (especially with the ability to crawl public social media profiles) what people's beliefs are, by the "negative space" they create. This is how you make the case for what their real motivations are. They will of course deny it, but anyone paying attention can see for themselves.