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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> rate them as leaning left with high factualness.

that seems to be the trend with left leaning news sources. They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.

The right leaning news sources tend to tell a mix of truth and complete fabrications, while also refusing talk about truths inconvenient to the narrative they're telling so sure NPR is the clear winner in that sense, but the bar is set so low that it can't really be counted as a victory.

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> They don't make up lies, but they hide truths leaving people with a distorted view of the facts they have. It's nice to be able to trust that you're not being directly lied to by NPR, but you still end up feeling deceived.

It's not just the omissions though, it's the implications.

For example, they were covering the Republicans saying they want to do something about the immigrants and Fentanyl illegally coming over the border. NPR's coverage made a point of telling you that most of the Fentanyl comes over at marked border crossings rather than through the desert, strongly implying this was meant to be refuting some lie the Republicans were telling. But the clip they aired didn't have the Republicans claiming otherwise. They were plausibly talking about the desert in the context of the people crossing there. And installing a border fence there could arguably free up some customs resources to use to inspect more trucks. But they're so desperate for a "gotcha" that they make one up.

The republicans are lying about that topic though.

Fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. Stopping immigration will not stop the fentanyl.

Most (not all) of the seized fentanyl is not being smuggled by immigrants coming over the border. The arguments Republicans make are that the migrants are exacerbating the situation by diverting customs resources and that those numbers could be skewed because there is equipment to detect drugs at ports of entry but not between border crossings, so the seizure rates could be higher at ports of entry out of proportion to the trafficking rates.

Obviously this is politics and people can disagree with their arguments, but this is one of the other favorite "don't lie but kind of do" games. The claim that detection rates could be higher at ports of entry isn't outrageous, there is some logic to it, but since by definition we don't know what the rate of undetected trafficking is in each location, there is "no evidence" for their claim. This is not equivalent to it being proven false, but that will often be implied.

Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.

To believe this, you have to assume that the reporting on fentanyl smuggling by the DEA and CBP and the fentanyl convictions data from the USSC that all point to US citizen being responsible for bringing in fentanyl in to the US is insufficient because "we don't know the undetected trafficking rate is in each location". It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.

> Republicans are saying that immigrants are literally bringing fentanyl in (as in they have fentanyl in their backpacks when crossing the border). That they are the cause of the fentanyl problem. Stop them to solve the fentanyl problem.

Again, they're making two parallel arguments. One is, some of the migrants have fentanyl (true; not established that the number is very large), but the number could be large and isn't known. The other is, customs is spread thin because of migrants and is not catching the smugglers as a result. In both cases they propose the same solution, i.e. stem the flow of migrants.

> It's possible that we missed this one immigrant carrying by themself 51% of the fentanyl brought into the US, so lets put the blame on immigrants.

The claim is presumably that they could be missing a lot because there are a lot of migrants and more than one of them could have brought fentanyl.

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