First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Saying this is a "spin" seems like an attempt to undermine the comment.
> Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.
Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what they're is saying. I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
Pointing this out is useful because it shows the irony in the whole matter. This kind of wooden interpretation of words and lazy disqualification is what leads someone to the "black and white" spin you're accusing the GP of. This falls in line with the type of _gotcha_ logic that insists: "Well you said x, and x means X regardless of rhetorical device usage." and "OP has expressed sentiment in Y, which leads me to believe he's actually Y and therefore not $CREDIBLE".
The point is, engaging like this deprives the dialogue of nuance, rhetorical freedom and grace. If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
>I think that most people would read this as "by in large, most are lying".
This is still too extreme. "Lying" requires intentionality and implies maliciousness. It suggests that people who work in media are mostly evil people with the primary goal of misleading you. It both ignores and shows ignorance of how the media industry actually works. It also removes any hope of actually fixing the media industry because the only solution according to this mindset is getting rid of all the lying journalists. It doesn't leave any room to understand or address the incentives that actually got us to our current situation.
Disagree. "Lying" is objectively deceit, or intending to deceive. It can be, and often is, malicious, but to ascribe all lying as malicious is a step too far.
It is pretty funny to see this reply from you. You are guilty here of the exact thing you were criticizing in your last comment. It is "Perhaps the most wooden way to interpret what [I'm] saying".
I never described "all lying as malicious". I said it "implies maliciousness" and you said it "often is, malicious". I don't see a disagreement here.
I think the tension we're walking here is to keep one hand grounded in the fact that words can have a discrete, objective meaning *while also* allowing for individual freedom of expression. Modernity vs unhinged relativism.
I lie to my children when I say that the TV needs to recharge after their morning shows. A way to divert their attention elsewhere, but not out of malice.
One form of obvious lying is the modern headline. Now that clicks drive revenue many story's don't even come close to what the headline suggests. I do think this is maliciousness, they're telling a lie to draw you in to make money off of you.
This is an example of what I'm talking about. Journalist by and large are not in favor of editors slapping misleading headlines on their work. You are ascribing this practice to maliciousness when it is actually a reluctant response to incentives.
Yeah, it does baffle me when audiences that are supposed to tackle complex topics everyday (and complexity in general) have to fallback to black and white explanations in social aspects.
What do you think is the proper response if someone steals of loaf of bread? Would you label them a dishonest irredeemable criminal and throw them in jail for life?
If there was an abundant, inexpensive, legal supply of bread and all the thief had to do was value honesty more than free bread, rather than continuing to steal, across decades, thousands of loafs of bread, yes.
I think it's ok to take the illustration to that extreme, given the postulation that you say someone thinks that you should destroy a person's life over one loaf of bread.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...
is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.
> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).
Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.
They're lying though, that's the problem. Not 100% lying, but ignoring facts that contradict the narrative they have ongoing with their readership (so they don't look like they were wrong), and picking out those that contribute to their fantasy.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I've just seen first hand (1) the real information on the battlefield (2) the public affair office's briefing to medias, which is factual although omits sensitive things and (3) the media's subsequent reporting which largely ignores what the PAO said and goes on with their made up interpretation. It's frankly sickening. They're writing fantasy.
"Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.
> For clarity, 40 ppm (parts per million) is equivalent to 0.004% of the composition.
Lots of things are dangerous even at concentrations measured in PPM. For example, the level of Phosgene that’s “immediately dangerous to life” is 2 ppm: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/75445.html.
Maybe the point is that this 20 ppm quickly turns into less based on further dilution. But there’s a lot of analysis required to support the post’s assertions that the author just skips over.
I think there are two interlocking arguments: first, a historical argument: news organizations substanitally misleading the public is basically normal, in most countries and time periods. Second, the structural argument: why exactly should we think that a news organization should be capable of providing the basic facts?
If you consider the decades of scolarship it takes to clarify extremely well doccumented events, like the outbreak of the first world war, it's clear that even with a mountain of evidence, and all the time in the world, the 'basic facts' can be stubornly elusive even with the best of intentions.
The idea that an accurate picture should be able to emerge before 9-o'clock, in a newsroom, in a haze of conflicting reports, seems pretty incredible to me: and historically, that's not what has happened. So 'accurate news' is neither something we should expect, nor something we have a great deal of evidence of.
This comment is well intended, I'm sure. I always respect anyone trying to 'stick to the facts.' Unfortunately, it's just not history. Easy to google history. You are simply not familiar with how this all works.
The most valuable asset of a new organization is trust, and thus they are often bought as propaganda platforms.
But propaganda is tricky, you need people to keep paying attention which means the most overt spin is to be avoided. Done well you shift the narrative over decades not just swap positions on day one. Fox News is the most well known US example, but you don’t want to just preach to people who already believe your message.
Thus you want to control the widest possible selection of media.
The Fox horizontal integration is brilliant. They pull in people with sports and other complimentary content and cross-sell the profitable propaganda.
The New York Post is a great example. It was the sports and bookie newspaper - they’d publish Vegas odds and have tabloid news. They slowly transformed into a giant editorial paper and funnel into the broader Fox ecosystem.
They have an effective, free product. I need to pay to read The NY Times, but Fox is free and the sponsors are all low quality high margin stuff. Radio is prostate pills, TV is old people drugs and gold, etc.
Fox calls itself "Fox News". Only when they're pressed and presented with evidence that they're liars will they hide behind "That's okay, this is all just entertainment!" excuses. Their viewers don't think they're watching made up stories for entertainment. They're convinced that Fox/OAN are the only news agencies that tell the truth.
I’m not a fan of CNN, but they do a better job at distinguishing the difference between news and editorial.
The Fox issue is they conflate the two. I used to watch alot of TV news and the actual news content was pretty good on Fox on national issues, but their affiliates were usually pretty awful.
The news product produced by the networks until circa 1999 were a superior product in every way. Cable outlets have always danced with these issues as a TV channel that says the same thing all day gets boring.
CNN isn't good, but it's not even close to being equivalent. I doubt there's a single news org that doesn't let their bias slip from time to time, but let's not pretend that makes them all the same or that there aren't some much much worse than others.
Do you watch professional wrestling by any chance? They are in essence the same business model. Most people know both are largely fake, but some people actually believe. It’s the entertainment industry. Capital influences everything.
Most western audiences of professional wrestling know its scripted/practiced/"fake". Most western audiences of Fox News think it's all real.
Interesting, I worked in Saudi Arabia for awhile...most of the Africans and Southeast Asian laborers were all 100% convinced that professional wrestling was real. Pro wrestling is HUGE in developing nations.
The difference is that a lot of the old wrestlers and promoters hate Vince macmahon for goingnto court and admitting Pro Wrestling was fake during the steroid trial, but the likes of Tucker Carlson has gone to court and has testified that hes an entertainer and people still believe him.
Seems like a cynical take by someone that knows what they watch is largely fake, and they want to apply the same rules to the other side so they feel better about their exclusivity to confirmation bias enabling programming.
No, the underlying business model, get people to watch your product in order to maximize ad sales, is basically the same. The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Personally, I don’t watch anything. I read across a broad array of print sources and prefer to trust specific journalists rather than entire organizations. I try to get most information from primary sources, or to triangulate information from multiple outlets which are preferably maximally uncorrelated. This is much easier than it may sound. And think tanks and academics are often better information sources than entertainment news outlets.
> The incentives are therefore essentially the same. Money talks.
Are you implying the NYT never publishing anything that upsets their readership? Every week #CancelNYT trends because they "platformed" something their left wing audience didn't like.
Even Fox News lost viewers because they dared declare the 2020 election free and fair, and in favor of Biden.
> there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
No, not for propaganda. If you want people to have a certain perception and position on a topic, selective reporting of topics and the presentation of them is far more relevant. This certainly does qualify as misleading.
Lies are even more ineffective since they often can be directly disproved, which biases people to believe the opposite. You want to present your spin in a certain blur.
Many prominent sociologist pretty much explain the mechanisms media and advertisers employ in detail. To say this is a fringe position is misleading too.
Yep. This is a cynical counsel of despair. "Don't try filtering truth from lies. Everyone does it. Just lie back and think of England."
There is a difference between withholding information, selective emphasis, and outright lies. They are all bad, but they are equally bad. If you want to make things better you attempt to differentiate better from worse actors.
TLDR; all media, and all people, are biased, but they are not all equally biased. This bias can produce false beliefs. If you think false beliefs are a bad thing you promote the better actors and condemn the worse.
Also some news media actually reports on events that hurts the cause of their collective political leanings, some just don't. This isn't apples to apples.
I was living in the US but spending considerable time in Europe in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Almost every US newspaper printed the blatant and unconvincing lies of the Bush Administration as if they were fact, and reported the results of the weapons inspectors as if they were gullible idiots.
Meanwhile, outside the UK even conservative news outlets in Europe were deeply skeptical of the whole story.
At the time, I thought the government and the news media knew something I didn't, because it just seemed ridiculous that they could overthrow an entire government in a few weeks for a few tens of billions of dollars.
It turned out that no, it was just one great big lie from top to bottom. (Only the SF Gate showed any skepticism at all, bless their hearts.)
> Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying.
It should be obvious to ethical or moral people, but I guess I need to explain that your statement is very often not correct.
Deliberately covering up the truth is often a form of lying. For example, if the American people had known that the weapons of mass destruction claim came from a single person nicknamed Curveball who had made false claims in the past and whom the CIA suspected might be crazy (thus the nickname!), I suspect the Iraq War might never have happened.
"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
I am not a native English speaker, so my cultural priors might be way off, but I think those two things are quite different. Lying is making statements that the speaker knows are false.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.
The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
"The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one."
There is if you look up definitions. Lying involves falsehoods. You can mislead someone using selective truths without using falsehoods. That's why the article etc was about misleading, persuading, etc and not mentioning lying (aside from the commentor I originally responded to).
Yep. Lies are not the same thing as being dishonest.
You can use lies to be misleading, or manipulative, or dishonest but you don't need to, and it's usually more effective if you don't (or at least don't entirely).
If someone can't see how a person could be misleading without lying they're going to fall for a lot of bullshit.
The way I classify them is lying is "outright lies". "intend to mislead" is manipulation. The nuance between manipulation and lies is that manipulation usually distorts a collection of facts through rearrangement, omission or massaging those things to create a view that is not factual, which I think may also relate it as implicit lies. Lying is stating explicitly counter-factual things. I prefer the distinction of using manipulation over implicit lies as I think it communicates the narrower focused maliciousness of it, where lies don't always have that same level of "premeditation", for lack of a better term.
Then what distinction was being made? Knowingly providing an incomplete picture, focusing on one side, or selective editing are intended to misled. They are not "outright lies" nor "counter-factual".
I am interacting in good faith. A lie requires a falsehood. There is a difference between a lie and deception - they aren't perfect synonymous. The example from your cited definition is really a poor one since it relies on a saying more than a factual use of the word, and the example itself does imply an actual falsehood in that someone lied during the marriage vows or during the marriage.
But wait, let's look at the instant replay. You claim that lying and deception at the same. So why would you get involved in this conversation to say that? According to you, their use is interchangeable and makes no difference.
If you have something to add to the actual conversation and not about definitions, then please do.
There is concept called a "lie of omission". I did not invent that term - it's older than you and i combined. Intentionally witholding information to deceive a person has long been considered a lie.
There is a difference between telling a lie and being mistaken, no? If you are learning something and give the wrong answer on a quiz, are you lying? Both of those are falsehoods that aren't intending to deceive, and most people wouldn't count those as lies.
There's a couple other concepts I suggest you look into: adjective and category. "Bird of prey" is still a bird no? "Person of interest" is still a person, no? "Box of chocolates", "bag of food", "bottle of whiskey", and "bowl of soup" are all containers no?
Again, anything to add to the actual discussion? Aren't you the one that was complaining about semantics?
Lie of omission is an atypical use and is inconsistent with the definition that I posted earlier. You can cherry pick your definition while ignoring the one I posted and use typical examples that don't correleate to this atypical use that changes the very definition.
If I withhold information from you it may be misleading, but it quite simply is not a lie. Now please stop trolling and actually contribute to the conversation about distrust of the media instead of focusing on the very thing you complained about - semantics.
It turns out this is a very old discussion. There is a concept called a "lie of omission". Here's a wikipedia page about the entire concept of lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
A question for you: if you make a mistake or misunderstand something then share it, are you a liar?
I don't mean like your current actions - the part where you are pretending that you have never encountered the notion of lying like this is clearly itself some sort of lie. I mean like say you apply some math rule incorrectly on a test. Should you be kicked out for lying to the teacher?
To lie is to tell a deliberate falsehood - to say something you know to be untrue. Sometimes this is taken to be acceptable - to tell a "white lie", e.g. in response to, "Does this dress make me look fat?"
Saying something incorrect, but which you believe to be true, is no lie.
> but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy.
Isn’t… isn’t that a pretty black and white spin on the idea of sociology? Do you have any studies to share that indicate “politically colored armchair philosophy”?
A curated set of facts or as you call it “incomplete, but not counter-factual” is not the truth. All facts are the truth and that’s what non opinion news should be reporting.
First: I don't know which sociological studies you refer to, but most of it is politically colored arm chair philosophy. These insights didn't come from sociology, but from political movements.
Second: there's a difference not providing a full picture of a war or a new economic policy, and outright lying. I expect news organizations to provide me with the basic info: incomplete, but not counter-factual. Saying they're all lying and always have is a (probably politically motivated) spin against normal news organizations.