This is a great example of how journalists will shamelessly jump all over a story and selectively represent the truth to the point that, taken as a whole, the article becomes a misrepresentation.
Leading people to believe things that are wildly untrue using statements that are technically not lies does as much damage to society as doing it any other way, in my opinion. Sure, in theory smart people might be able to spot that what the article is trying to convince them of isn't backed up by the facts it uses - but in practice they almost never seem to, not even other journalists. (Here in the UK, the BBC seems to be a bit of a repeat offender - some other partisan rag publishes something designed to lead people to an untrue conclusion without technically lying, and then the BBC just outright repeats the untrue claim.)
Consider the source of the article. The root of modern journalism is to make a negative insinuation despite official statements to the contrary and let the reader's preconceived notions run wild.
Either they can do it or they shouldn't do it at all. It makes little sense to read an article that you know from the beginning is wrong because the journalist couldn't understand what he's writing about. Bad information is worse than no information.
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.
There isn't any value in establishing an arbitrary boundary. A small clickbait blog with a story that is 100% manufactured typically has less effect on public opinion than a mainstream outlet that publishes half or quarter truths. They are both doing a huge disservice to the public and are ethically bankrupt, and shouldn't even be called journalists.
I’m also a writer (ghostwriting mostly) so I sympathize with that view, but not when it comes to major newspapers publishing misleading content, especially when the “mistakes” seem coordinated to support an emotive or political agenda.
That little “rule” sounds so smart, huh? That people are just dumb and there is no pattern to anything. It’s all random and people are just fumbling about, doing “stupid” or “random” shit. Their mind is distracted because they need to pick up their child froms school.
But it’s not even about malice or intent. It’s about patterns and analysis of how the media operates. You observe if things are slanted in a certain way. If they give one side the benefit of the doubt while the other not so much.
It’s not about finding evidence of the inner workings/mind of some run of the mill journalist. It’s about seeing what kind of output certain outlets put out. On aggregate.
This has been done before. It can be done.
And how do you disregard such good work? By half-quoting—it’s so cliche that you won’t lower yourself to finish the pseudo-quote—some smarter-than-thou, above the fray nonsense which fundamentally confuses individual intent (i.e. “conspiracy”) with aggregate analysis, all because you got hung up on the particular-sounding “bias of the journalist”, which could originally have been meant to be illustrative[1] and could have been taken as such in a charitable reading, especially since it’s not like any of us even remember the byline of this article.
[1] Although note that the original poster totally folded in a sibling comment, so whatever…
Whether the statements are true or not is what the journalists should care about
This is a very naive view of journalism. It is trivial to do horrible, biased reporting while printing statements that are factually true or not falsifiable. In fact, that is how most of the biased articles are constructed these days. In the age of the Internet you can't get away with outright lies. The tool of trade are mission, misrepresentation, manufactured context, selective citation, cherrypiked expert opinions and so on.
I would really like to find a way to incentivize journalists to stop doing that kind of thing. Artistically misleading people shouldn't be seen as acceptable in factual journalism. This should have been rejected and rewritten.
But the author is making a claim that this is a contradiction. There is an obvious explanation that disagrees with the author that was ommited. That is exactly what we complain about in journalism.
reply