I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
"I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts."
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or elide facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more toward Scott's assessment that this isn't lying, as in knowingly transmitting false information. I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
Given how people communicate around me, I'm not sure. It often feels that when people talk about politics around me, they often reuse the same rhetorical techniques they heard on a show without much thought. But I'm not sure they're doing it all consciously.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
In my experience (as a former journalist) it usually starts off with the latter and morphs into the former if you aren't vigilant (which is why it is better to just not do any of it.) It starts off with you reading some moron on social media explain things exactly backwards or in some other bizarrely stupid fashion, and so you write an article explaining how things really went down, and you use emotive language to drive home how right you are. Then your article, which is full of slams against the outgroup, gets retweeted by your colleagues and maybe a big name retweets it! Plus your boss loves it and so do all of your friends! Depending on how much you have dealt with popularity already, it can go one of two* ways - it either overwhelms you immediately and you instantly begin writing for more retweets, or you marinade in it and stick to what you were doing, and over time - as the depression endemic with being a truth teller in a post truth world blossoms and grows - subconsciously your brain recognises that you are less unhappy when you write the party line, and then you begin writing for more retweets. I'm not sure which is worse - the instant party slave has desperation behind them, but the boiled frog has had time to rationalise and justify everything she's done.
*There is a third route of course - due to broken brains and a prior surplus of popularity you don't give a shit about praise from anyone who isn't your dad, and so all the praise you get for your slam article makes you ashamed of it and yourself for writing it and you resolve to never do it again and you put way too much effort into making every article give as many facts as possible, and your commissions slowly dry up as your dry and informative articles are pushed aside by bombastic partisan bullshit. Eventually you quit and end up writing puns to annoy smart people in debate forums and working at a farmer's market, and you find you are infinitely happier than you were when every day meant grappling with a choice between sticking to your principles or being good at your job.
I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
I'm at least partially influenced by my legal background. You know how when a witness is sworn in they are giving an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
If a witness is asked a question and intentionally omits relevant information, especially if they are pressed on the point, that does in fact constitute perjury. The whole point of witness testimony is to elicit all the truthful information about a situation, and omitting relevant information that one believes to be true is lying under oath. As can be embellishing the facts.
So when I hear mainstream media talking heads using artful or evasive phrasing when describing an event, it immediately turns on my "cross examination" sense.
But hey, newspaper stories and TV reports aren't under oath so perhaps the comparison is strained.
Sounds like you're noticing the fallacious nature of much reporting, where explicit or implied conclusions simply don't logically follow from stated premises and the actual informational content of the report is diluted to the point its useless. The noise drowns out the signal. Which may be less about deceit and more about catering to an audience.
Which brings up:
how much of this type of communication is done consciously?
Simplest explanation is that they understand that their paycheck depends on them espousing a particular viewpoint to the audience that supports them and they adjust accordingly.
I read a comment a long time ago during the Obama years that elucidated this for me. Basically, imagine you're Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity and you KNOW your job hinges on telling your audience that Obama is the antichrist.
And one day the report comes out that Obama rescued a drowning puppy and gave it CPR to revive it. There's photos, videos, and gushing eyewitness testimony. It is all very heroic.
Does this mean you have to change your message that night? No. You just sigh, go on the air, and figure some way to spin it to say this just PROVES Obama is Satanic. You have to, it's what you do.
Switch out whichever media personalities and politicians you want, that applies across the board.
And the same thing applies. Somewhat less obviously, with reporters. Across the board.
They have a job, not principles. And that job depends on maintaining an audience.
But aren't there a bunch of mechanisms in court for masking out information that colors the opinions of the jurors without being in fact pertinent to the precise questions asked? Ie. witnesses are supposed to answer completely, but they're specifically not supposed to give information that would suggest inferences that they don't have direct knowledge of? It seems to me that inasmuch as the media lies, it is in good part with additional information that would be struck in court - too much truth, rather than not enough.
(Sadly, there is no Media Judge to strike paragraphs for hearsay.)
Yes, and there's no opposing attorney to object to irrelevant testimony or to cross-examine and impeach the witness by catching them in a contradiction or revealing a "hidden" motive to lie.
It's all very frustrating for someone who is used to being able to directly attack seeming false or evasive answers on the spot, with a witness who cannot escape the questioning or shout you down.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.
Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".
Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Strong agree.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
Yeah, it seems like the goal is to get the average person, or at least the average voter, to completely outsource their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate surroundings to """trusted""" third parties... whilst also ensuring that those third parties are never accountable for getting any given report wrong, or ignoring a relevant story, or even outright spinning or modifying the facts on occasion.
This is perhaps where the comparison to religious faith becomes most apt. Rather than perceiving/divining the 'truth' themselves, the people are expected to accept the church's edicts and bring any queries one has to the priests who can sort things right out and possibly punish nonbelievers.
At which point, the only factual disputes that may be permitted are interdenominational ones.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
Yes, and as per my initial comment, it'd be nice if he had explicitly laid out his definition of 'lie.'
That's the missing context I'd really like to be added in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not so sure. I'm leaning more toward Scott's assessment that this isn't lying, as in knowingly transmitting false information. I'm not sure what a better word for what you and Scott are using as examples though. In my mind, I call it simply bad faith communication or bad faith argument.
What I find more interesting is the question of how much of this type of communication is done consciously? Do the people writing for Fox News or the NYT sit down and say to themselves, "I am now going to try and trick another mind to believe what I think it should believe?" Or is it more subconscious, like, "I will now fill the reader's mind with The Truth!"?
Given how people communicate around me, I'm not sure. It often feels that when people talk about politics around me, they often reuse the same rhetorical techniques they heard on a show without much thought. But I'm not sure they're doing it all consciously.
In my experience (as a former journalist) it usually starts off with the latter and morphs into the former if you aren't vigilant (which is why it is better to just not do any of it.) It starts off with you reading some moron on social media explain things exactly backwards or in some other bizarrely stupid fashion, and so you write an article explaining how things really went down, and you use emotive language to drive home how right you are. Then your article, which is full of slams against the outgroup, gets retweeted by your colleagues and maybe a big name retweets it! Plus your boss loves it and so do all of your friends! Depending on how much you have dealt with popularity already, it can go one of two* ways - it either overwhelms you immediately and you instantly begin writing for more retweets, or you marinade in it and stick to what you were doing, and over time - as the depression endemic with being a truth teller in a post truth world blossoms and grows - subconsciously your brain recognises that you are less unhappy when you write the party line, and then you begin writing for more retweets. I'm not sure which is worse - the instant party slave has desperation behind them, but the boiled frog has had time to rationalise and justify everything she's done.
*There is a third route of course - due to broken brains and a prior surplus of popularity you don't give a shit about praise from anyone who isn't your dad, and so all the praise you get for your slam article makes you ashamed of it and yourself for writing it and you resolve to never do it again and you put way too much effort into making every article give as many facts as possible, and your commissions slowly dry up as your dry and informative articles are pushed aside by bombastic partisan bullshit. Eventually you quit and end up writing puns to annoy smart people in debate forums and working at a farmer's market, and you find you are infinitely happier than you were when every day meant grappling with a choice between sticking to your principles or being good at your job.
...That third route sounds oddly specific, is that based on a real person?
Yeah I got to the end and realised that I never went party slave or boiled frog, so which route did I go? The route of self righteous failure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm at least partially influenced by my legal background. You know how when a witness is sworn in they are giving an oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
If a witness is asked a question and intentionally omits relevant information, especially if they are pressed on the point, that does in fact constitute perjury. The whole point of witness testimony is to elicit all the truthful information about a situation, and omitting relevant information that one believes to be true is lying under oath. As can be embellishing the facts.
So when I hear mainstream media talking heads using artful or evasive phrasing when describing an event, it immediately turns on my "cross examination" sense.
But hey, newspaper stories and TV reports aren't under oath so perhaps the comparison is strained.
Sounds like you're noticing the fallacious nature of much reporting, where explicit or implied conclusions simply don't logically follow from stated premises and the actual informational content of the report is diluted to the point its useless. The noise drowns out the signal. Which may be less about deceit and more about catering to an audience.
Which brings up:
Simplest explanation is that they understand that their paycheck depends on them espousing a particular viewpoint to the audience that supports them and they adjust accordingly.
I read a comment a long time ago during the Obama years that elucidated this for me. Basically, imagine you're Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity and you KNOW your job hinges on telling your audience that Obama is the antichrist.
And one day the report comes out that Obama rescued a drowning puppy and gave it CPR to revive it. There's photos, videos, and gushing eyewitness testimony. It is all very heroic.
Does this mean you have to change your message that night? No. You just sigh, go on the air, and figure some way to spin it to say this just PROVES Obama is Satanic. You have to, it's what you do.
Switch out whichever media personalities and politicians you want, that applies across the board.
And the same thing applies. Somewhat less obviously, with reporters. Across the board.
They have a job, not principles. And that job depends on maintaining an audience.
But aren't there a bunch of mechanisms in court for masking out information that colors the opinions of the jurors without being in fact pertinent to the precise questions asked? Ie. witnesses are supposed to answer completely, but they're specifically not supposed to give information that would suggest inferences that they don't have direct knowledge of? It seems to me that inasmuch as the media lies, it is in good part with additional information that would be struck in court - too much truth, rather than not enough.
(Sadly, there is no Media Judge to strike paragraphs for hearsay.)
Yes, and there's no opposing attorney to object to irrelevant testimony or to cross-examine and impeach the witness by catching them in a contradiction or revealing a "hidden" motive to lie.
It's all very frustrating for someone who is used to being able to directly attack seeming false or evasive answers on the spot, with a witness who cannot escape the questioning or shout you down.
The implication here is that we mainly have an epistemology crisis.
Most people aren't going to be as competent and trained in argumentation to spot these evasions but a big problem our society has is that even our "elites" can't spot them when the evasions are done as long as they're being done for reasons the NYT would support.
Implicitly their epistemology is "believe the implication of the NYT - don't look for the missing factual content or added non-factual content".
Very few people can reason out an epistemology on their own - most need to be educated in it. At the very least almost everyone needs to read about it and to do that one would have to find the right reading material. This means there's a lot of power in getting to set the ground rules of evaluating claims and installing a faulty epistemology - look at wikipedia and how it launders progressive claims through the "reliable sources" rule. The wikipedia rules are rules for deciding what should get printed on the site which implicitly makes them rules about discerning truth.
Progressives want to install rules like "trust the NYT" (which wikipedia has as a literal rule) because progressives known that other progressives control those institutions. Progressives still have a back door of "ignore the NYT when it says things we don't want to hear", of course.
Strong agree.
Yeah, it seems like the goal is to get the average person, or at least the average voter, to completely outsource their beliefs about the world beyond their immediate surroundings to """trusted""" third parties... whilst also ensuring that those third parties are never accountable for getting any given report wrong, or ignoring a relevant story, or even outright spinning or modifying the facts on occasion.
This is perhaps where the comparison to religious faith becomes most apt. Rather than perceiving/divining the 'truth' themselves, the people are expected to accept the church's edicts and bring any queries one has to the priests who can sort things right out and possibly punish nonbelievers.
At which point, the only factual disputes that may be permitted are interdenominational ones.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link