A pretty good post from Scott. The title is a bit clickbaity and there are some minor quibbles with using the modern print Infowars of today compared to the Alex Jones podcast version of a few years ago, which is what most people imagine when you say "Infowars".
A lot of people are getting distracted by the title and either 1) thinking Scott is disputing the definition of "lie" and asserting that lies by omission are acceptable, or 2) thinking Scott is claiming we should always trust the media. Neither of these are the case. It's clear his goal is to attack the notion that "misinformation" is easily classified as such, when in reality it's closer to "different spin on the same basic facts". This is the same issue "fact checkers" ran into when they were in vogue a few years ago, with how many of their "fact checks" were actually "wokists have different opinions checks".
It's still annoying using a clickbait title and then accusing readers of misunderstanding when clickbait invites people to look for counterexamples. It's obvious he write the title to get views and generate discussion of people finding counterexamples. Smart marketing move on his part, because it allows other people to do the marketing when pointing out the counterexamples.
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Notes -
A pretty good post from Scott. The title is a bit clickbaity and there are some minor quibbles with using the modern print Infowars of today compared to the Alex Jones podcast version of a few years ago, which is what most people imagine when you say "Infowars".
A lot of people are getting distracted by the title and either 1) thinking Scott is disputing the definition of "lie" and asserting that lies by omission are acceptable, or 2) thinking Scott is claiming we should always trust the media. Neither of these are the case. It's clear his goal is to attack the notion that "misinformation" is easily classified as such, when in reality it's closer to "different spin on the same basic facts". This is the same issue "fact checkers" ran into when they were in vogue a few years ago, with how many of their "fact checks" were actually "wokists have different opinions checks".
It's still annoying using a clickbait title and then accusing readers of misunderstanding when clickbait invites people to look for counterexamples. It's obvious he write the title to get views and generate discussion of people finding counterexamples. Smart marketing move on his part, because it allows other people to do the marketing when pointing out the counterexamples.
Yeah, the clickbait title is kind of silly, and it would be better if it was something like "The Media Rarely Outright Lies".
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