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.
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Notes -
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.
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