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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infowars isn't the media.
This, and the original article, both specifically dealt with Infowars as a source of factual information.
Reading the first couple of sentences it seems that the definition of lying has been twisted a bit. Lying is about conveying information with the intent to deceive the listener. The acknowledgment that is made in the article that they believe media often deceives their listeners to advance an agenda by intentionally leaving out important context means that they are lying. Trying to use a definition of lying that mean…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, and the original article, both specifically dealt with Infowars as a source of factual information.
Fair enough, but that's stupid and it undermines their thesis. Mainstream media rarely lies, although they are sometimes deceived or publish incorrect or inaccurate information (which is different than intentional deception and fabrication) but outlets like Inforwars lie all the time.
> So Infowars often provides accurate data, but interprets it incorrectly, without necessary context. They’re not alone in this; it’s much like how the New York Times reports on real child EEG data but interprets it incorrectly, or how Scientific American reports real data on women in STEM but interprets it incorrectly, etc. This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
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.
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)
In an effort to be 100% right about a general observation to which some exceptions exist, the author contorts the original argument o ridiculous extremes, asserting that other parties may be fools, may even be crazy, but they're absolutely not liars. I don't know why it's such a stretch to acknowledge that some people are dishonest; this seems like an ego trip of someone so anxious to preserve a reputation or self-pe…
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.
Reading the first couple of sentences it seems that the definition of lying has been twisted a bit. Lying is about conveying information with the intent to deceive the listener. The acknowledgment that is made in the article that they believe media often deceives their listeners to advance an agenda by intentionally leaving out important context means that they are lying. Trying to use a definition of lying that mean…
By that definition, everything is a lie because you can not convey all relevant information ever. I.e. all information exchange is a partial information exchange. 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…
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.
I mean, this is exactly how they get away with the level of dishonesty they disseminate. 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. Th…
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.
Reading the first couple of sentences it seems that the definition of lying has been twisted a bit. Lying is about conveying information with the intent to deceive the listener. The acknowledgment that is made in the article that they believe media often deceives their listeners to advance an agenda by intentionally leaving out important context means that they are lying. Trying to use a definition of lying that mean…