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Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
Ironically, I think Trump uses this (maybe unintentionally?) to his advantage. He can say something that sounds outrageous, and is indeed only half-true. But the second somebody goes to do any research to confirm or debunk it, they discover that the actual truth is less bad but... still pretty fucking bad. And now they have that information in their head, and it makes them marginally more likely to vote Trump.
By making his puffed up lies that have a core of truth so ridiculous-sounding, it basically invites someone to be like "NO WAY that is true" and actually look up information.
People here have talked about how Trump lies like a used car salesman whereas most politicians lie like lawyers, and that's an example. Same with him making claims about dogs and cats getting eaten. Maybe not literally true, but a bit of research will bring other things to people's attention.
This strategy is at the heart of Trump's approach to the truth. It presents the media with a difficult dilemma. In response to a lie from him they can either:
(A) Helpfully clarify the grain of truth in what he said and in so doing help Trump use bald lies to manipulate audiences to where he wants them.
(B) Issue a denial of what he said without drilling down deeper, and in so doing fail in their duty to provide basic information audiences are seeking.
Both approaches are journalistic failures. It should be possible to find a middle way but most of the time media orgs struggle to do so. Or can't do so in a way that generates clicks.
As a result, the media orgs that choose route B provide extra ammo for Trump's claims of media bias, while those that choose route A really are tilting the game in his favour.
It's sort of a smart strategy but ends in tears for everyone.
It is notable that Democrat lies do not present the media a similar dilemma, given that we can observe them simply backing those lies to the hilt, unquestioningly, no matter how brazen.
The idea that the media is in any way interested in the truth is, at this late date, entirely unsupportable, and I am not comfortable allowing it to pass unchallenged. The media has now normalized rewriting their own archived output to match Democrat talking points in real-time. Large, well-coordinated lies from the Democrats last decades, result in obvious, devastating real-world outcomes, and generate zero accountability for those responsible. Truth was never a part of this process, and I do not believe that you or any of the other commenters decrying this issue are actually interested in the truth any more than the media is.
I think this is too huge a topic to litigate here but I do think journalists are pretty committed to technical truth-telling, and are moderated somewhat by norms of not being too shameless about their omissions. This immediately opposes them to Trump's different style of deceit.
How might we test this theory?
"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.
Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?
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Ding ding.
An honest press would resolve the problem to a large degree, but an honest press wouldn't be able to shift public perception to where THEY want it.
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