I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
"I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts."
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
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Notes -
I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
He made (at least part of) his point in this piece. It isn't "the media never lies therefore you can totally trust them." His point is "honesty is a gradient such that it's possible to be partially dishonest but not outright lying. Dishonesty in the media is subtle and ambiguous. This makes it impossible to make unambiguous censorship rules which are both effective at handling misinformation and impossible to abuse".
The media is dishonest in subtle ways without lying, therefore preventing misinformation is much harder than simply censoring/punishing lies. But censoring/punishing editorializing probably goes too far and prohibits any meaningful discourse beyond bare bones fact reporting.
This would be a problem... if there were any meaningful discourse occuring in the mainstream media.
Do you see such discourse taking place? Where?
But yes, the point that you can't readily sort objective truth out of the current information environment and then force all media to conform to such truth is quite accurate.
My point is that Scott is being charitable in saying the media "almost never lies" whereas I would say "the media lies constantly but has evolved to lie in ways that they won't be punished for."
And because they aren't punished in the slightest for these lies, they continue to espouse them, in an incredibly systematic way.
I think this is just a disagreement of semantics: you and he are using slightly different definitions for the word "lie". You are using it to include any form of dishonesty, or at least the forms the media uses, while Scott is using it to mean literal false statements of fact which are objectively disprovable.
Yes, and as per my initial comment, it'd be nice if he had explicitly laid out his definition of 'lie.'
That's the missing context I'd really like to be added in.
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