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Notes -
I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.
Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.
So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.
I totally agree with you that it is possible for someone to be deceptive in a subtle manner like this, but that doesn't change anything about the obligation to make your accusations comprehensible. There's nothing about this type of deception that makes it impossible to describe - even something simple in the form "While the situation was actually x, Sam deceived us into believing that the situation was y" would work. If the deception is so subtle and mysterious in its effects that it had no impact whatsoever, it wasn't a good enough justification for Sam's ouster.
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