[ncmncm]

The New York Times mastered all this long ago.

It is not necessary to lie. All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all.

Hans Blix's UN reports, before the invasion, about Iraq's entire lack of any WMD whatsoever were too important to completely ignore, but were easy enough to bury in a back page. The entire lack of any primary source information indicating Russian interference in the 2016 election was easy to avoid mentioning anywhere.

[pphysch]

I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment. I would not be surprised if many foreign editors and correspondents are undercover intelligence operatives. It's a great cover, like anthropology or human rights work, that gives individuals access to geopolitically sensitive regions.

> The role of war correspondents in the Gulf War would prove to be quite different from their role in Vietnam. The Pentagon blamed the media for the loss of the Vietnam war, and prominent military leaders did not believe the United States could sustain a prolonged and heavily televised war. As a result, numerous restrictions were placed on the activities of correspondents covering the war in the Gulf. Journalists allowed to accompany the troops were organized into "pools", where small groups were escorted into combat zones by US troops and allowed to share their findings later. Those who attempted to strike out on their own and operate outside the pool system claim to have found themselves obstructed directly or indirectly by the military, with passport visas revoked and photographs and notes taken by force from journalists while US forces observed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_correspondent#Gulf_War

[hguant]

US National Security, and the groups moving within it, are not monolithic. Different groups and agencies have very different policies regarding how to deal with journalists specifically.

DoD has been very up front - it's pay to play, as you noted. Stay in the lines, do what we want, keep your eyes on the narrative we're interested in, and opportunities and access with magically open up for you. Step outside the dotted line and whoops, you're in a warzone buddy and you need to leave now, base commander said so, sorry.

Whereas US foreign correspondents were, and as far as I can tell still are, entirely off limits for intelligence agencies to recruit from, work with, or even really interact with. State has put down as US policy that we respect the institution of (US) journalism, so no co-opting them. It's kind of a point of pride. Now, that doesn't mean avoid lying to them, no selling them, or just doing any of the various government tricks to throw a journalist onto a particular path, it just means none of the very obvious "you're going to drink the Kool aid" that DoD does.

Of course this is in abstract, I'm sure there are exceptions and people who broke the rule, but compared to the British intelligence services, who absolutely co-opted any and all foreign correspondent they could get their hands on, both as intelligence sources and to plant stories, or the Soviet/Russian Fed groups, the US has been relatively principled... relatively being the key word

[Clubber]

>I would be surprised if any major establishment media outlet has a foreign/international office not staffed with individuals very friendly with the national security establishment.

This is easy to prove. What do the intelligence agencies / government do to a person who leaks? Snowden, Assange, Winner, Manning. We know what they do. Why are there so many articles coming from "anonymous national security sources," where there is no attempt to punish the leaker? It's because it's an intentional plant/leak by said agency.

Any time you read an article sourced by "national security anonymous insider," or something to that effect, it's what the government wants you to think. There's a lot of this regarding ramping up military intervention support, among other things.

[areyousure]

In case anyone is curious, one can read the following front page article from March 8, 2003 to see how the NYT discussed reports from Blix and ElBaradei: https://archive.is/EdUCX

[hubrisbob]

An incredibly well written and timely article, if only it had been heeded. This brought shivers as I realize how far the NYT has now fallen.

[Broken_Hippo]

Misrepresenting facts in this way is still a form of lying. Speaking technical truths doesn't change that. Most lies aren't complete fabrications, honestly, even when they do contain a few.

[zaphar]

The most effective form of lying is lying by omission. It's harder to detect, easier to defend as just ignorance, and is perhaps more effective than outright false claims.

[mrjangles]

Far far more effective is lying by implication. This happens almost all the time. The article is written in such a way as to imply something is true; for example talking in such a way that said thing is obviously true and everyone knows it, when in fact it isn't true at all. This allows them to make the reader think something is true without lying, and often without even having the reader question it, and it allows the media to not even have to try to supply evidence at all.

[hammock]

"Cloth masks required," "vaccines required," etc.?

[amelius]

Why don't we make a law around it? I'm tired of politicians weaseling themselves out of difficult situations by saying "oh, I forgot about that". It's your job to bring important, relevant information to the table, damn it.

[dolni]

A law to do what, exactly? Criminalize the omission of facts from a statement? Criminalize ignorance?

Who decides when a fact was omitted? Was the fact pertinent (note: there's a lot of wiggle room here)? How much investigation has to be done to uncover whether there was a lie by omission or actual ignorance?

What would the penalty be?

Thinking you can legislate your way out of this is hopeless idealism.

[ncmncm]

It is physically impossible for anyone to express all facts in finite time. Every expression is, at best, a selection among the facts of that which is adjudged relevant. Legislating what would be relevant in every situation is likewise impossible.

Demonstrating that a fact is omitted with dishonest intent is tricky business. That doesn't mean we can't guess, but the law does not go by guesses.

[clairity]

i was told growing up that this was the difference between being honest and being truthful: honesty is about telling allcomers everything you know (or believe, with appropriate caveats) to be true, whereas being truthful is simply not advancing as truth things you know (or believe) to be false.

in any case, i've watched npr and nyt, two of my mostly former news sources, wrench from simply being biased to being outright hysterically partisan and dishonest. covid (over-)coverage being the most blatant, but it's been a long disintegration of truth and trust.

this is just a little part of the overall movement toward captured capital and centralized power, sweeping up news media along the way (note that these are editorial decisions, with editors seeking favor from the powerful). we're in for a rocky ride.

p.s. - a little tremor hit LA while writing this...

[ncmncm]

Through 200x, NPR was always having CIA flacks on. They seem not to be doing that anymore, since about Manning/Snowden.

[pphysch]

YMMV but every time I happened to be tuned into NPR (world) news I get an unhealthy dose of State Dept-curated misinformation on topics like Russia, China, Iran, etc.

If anything changed in the post-Collateral Murder world, its that the Washington's content filtering and propaganda subtly intensified.

[ncmncm]

NPR seem to get all their "world news" patched through from the BBC, which we know is badly compromised.

[slavik81]

Picard: You've already given an answer to the inquiry, and that answer was a lie.

Wesley: I said the accident occurred after the loop. It did.

Picard: What you neglected to mention was that following the loop your team attempted a maneuver that was the direct cause of the crash. You told the truth up to a point. But a lie of omission is still a lie.

[....]

Picard: The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. Whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based. If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened you don't deserve to wear that uniform.

https://youtu.be/8W0ff2Xns5g

[ksdale]

It's always interesting to me, the mental gymnastics people will do to convince themselves that they're not doing something they believe to be morally wrong. Like, if your intent is to mislead, what do you care if you're technically telling the truth?

[mrjangles]

It isn't mental gymnastics, the media has two very good and intentional reasons for doing this. Number one is to avoid being sued while still being able to get away with misleading their audience. Number two is that it gives the zealots following their cause to clear their conscience by saying "see this article was factually correct" when, on the rare occasion, someone bothers to call them out on the lie.

[ksdale]

"Number two is that it gives the zealots following their cause to clear their conscience by saying "see this article was factually correct" when, on the rare occasion, someone bothers to call them out on the lie."

This is literally mental gymnastics, why would it clear their conscience if they intended to mislead? It only clears their conscience because they're doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they're not technically lying.

[ren_engineer]

The NYT won a Pulitzer for helping the Soviets cover up millions starving to death. They've always been a propaganda rag

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...

[tablespoon]

> The NYT won a Pulitzer for helping the Soviets cover up millions starving to death. They've always been a propaganda rag

Your comment itself is a example of how to mislead with facts.

[innocentoldguy]

I agree. The problem isn't just cherry-picked truths either. It is the use of non-sequitur arguments by "fact-checkers" like Politifact, WT.Social, Snopes, etc. to draw false conclusions from various things that are indeed true.

For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."

Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.

This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.

[kilna]

I have a friend who used to work for Snopes. The organization absolutely engages in what you describe. The sad thing is, it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s what humans do naturally and subconsciously to shore up their cognitive dissonance… particularly when faced with uncomfortable facts pertaining to establishment systems, organizations and identity politicians they supported.

The Snopes article that made me take notice of this bias was the one letting Clinton off the hook for equating millennials to "basement dwellers" while speaking to wealthy donors during the 2016 election.

Clinton never used the exact sequence of words “basement dwellers”. Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision. The cherry picked position of asserting that "basement dweller" specifically wasn't used... is fundamentally meaningless, and is exactly the same sort of straw-man you were describing above.

She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

“And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”

There is no way to read that statement without it dripping with condescension. Without full context, what Snopes advanced was patent misrepresentation… and then on top of that to call the “basement dweller” accusation untrue…? Bullshit. It’s “mixed” at best. Any intellectually honest person with full context would recognize her statements for what they were.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clintons-basement-dwellers/

[innocentoldguy]

Yes, exactly! I read that article on Snopes and know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for offering another example of it.

My hope is that we'll all wake up to these tactics and stop letting politicians and media organizations lie and manipulate us for their own gain. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything anymore, regardless of who says it, unless I see a full, in-context video of the event. Even then it can be iffy due to editing that isn't obvious.

[iconjack]

That's a good one, but my all-time favorite is this one: Hillary Clinton used a hammer to smash her mobile phone during an FBI investigation.

Mixture: It was not just one phone, but many, and it was one of her aides, not Hillary herself, who did the smashing.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

[Aunche]

>Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision.

I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).

https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/10/02/sanders-agrees...

>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.

IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.

[kilna]

> She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be

That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.

CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.

> Why should it be?

Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.

And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.

[Aunche]

>Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.

[kilna]

Bernie's support of Clinton is something that a non-trivial number of his supporters did not agree with him on, I include myself in that number. Regardless, droves of Bernie supporters showed up at the polls to vote for Clinton, at a rate greater than prior Obama voters.

Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.

You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You believe that the NYT has a goal of misleading people with facts?

[BitwiseFool]

I do. The NYT is chock full of partisans who seem to have little to no apprehension about framing "the facts" in whatever way helps to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. All the while presenting themselves as some beacon of objective truth and journalistic integrity.

And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Apparently, you see no difference in the goals of "shaping public opinion" and misleading people (with or without facts).

I'm not interested in defending the NYT. I'm just interested in the judgements of other people about the NYT that seem to me to be, shall we say, a little over the top.

And note: I think it would as true of SSC/SA as the NYT that they seek to shape public opinion in a direction that aligns with their worldview. If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?

[jimmydoreornot]

I concur that the term "shaping public opinion" is more accurate in many cases, but not in others. There are enough stories where the author clearly understood something about the story and attempted to convey something else to the reader for political/cultural effect. For example, not reporting on the race of a black perpetrator but always reporting on the race of a black victim.

There is a less activist way of presenting the news that doesn't attempt to "shape public opinion". I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite. I've read (some of) Manufacturing Consent. Today's media in America (almost all of it, NYT being no exception) heavily shapes public opinion, turning news reporting into a political battleground.

[BitwiseFool]

The most noticeable example of activism at work is the difference in coverage (and condemnation) between January 6th and the CHAZ/CHOP event. While both events included the occupation of a government building, one is seen as an insurrection and the other is more of a protest. I don't want to start a tangent comparing every aspect of the two, but needless to say, there are some big commonalities that are covered in a very different light depending on one's partisan outlook.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> I don't want to start a tangent comparing every aspect of the two, but needless to say, there are some big commonalities that are covered in a very different light depending on one's partisan outlook.

The idea that there are "big commonalities" between these two is a claim that only makes sense given a fairly specific worldview.

While I can understand the worldview that identifies the commonalities and thus finds inconsistencies in the way the NYT covered them both, I also happen to have a worldview in which the two incidents are not fundamentally related at all other than under an extremely broad category, so broad that it's not particularly meaningful. Armed with that worldview, I don't find anything inconsistent in the coverage.

Anyway, I'm a European by birth. I don't buy into the nominal American dream of objective news coverage, not in any way shape or form. Journalistic integrity to me has almost nothing to do with whether one's journalism is free from bias. You can argue that the only meaningful definition is the one claimed by a journalism outlet about its own work, and I think that's fair. But I don't really see anywhere that the NYT claims to to have no worldview that informs and structures its work.

[BitwiseFool]

I sense debating my choice of the words "shaping public opinion" is going to be tangential. While what you said "If you speak publically, and don't speak complete jibberish, what else are you doing than seeking to shape public opinion?" is true, that isn't the heart of what I was getting at.

If the NYT is going to brand itself as some paragon of journalistic integrity, I would expect them to be dramatically more consistent with how they choose to cover and editorialize things.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I find the NYT to be extremely consistent in how they choose to cover and editorialize things. But by that I mean internally self-consistent, not that they behave as if they do not have a worldview that informs and shapes their work.

[ncmncm]

Their fawning support for 43 but opposition to 45 seems sort of inconsistent.

[nradov]

I would recommend reading Bari Weiss' resignation letter from the New York Times. They have really stepped up their efforts to mislead people

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Bari Weiss' resignation letter is primarily about the NYT no longer publishing op-eds that she thinks they should (and would have) published. If you want to interpret that as "misleading people", be my guest.

Weiss has her own problems with misleading people too, and I for one was glad to see her leave the NYT and make her positions clearer than they had been in a number of her op-eds for the paper.

[tablespoon]

> And, they're notoriously obtuse to work with. Remember what they did to Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)?

What do you mean? All they were going to do was mention his name, which is a very normal thing to do.

The obtuse bit was actually the expectation of Alexander and various SSC fans that they could impose idiosyncratic rules on others that they were in no position to enforce.

[octodog]

Can you share some examples that have led you to this belief?

[pessimizer]

Their best method is hiding editorial and misinformation with references to earlier stories where the opinion or falsehood is in a (sometimes unattributed) quote, but in the later story is stated as a well-known fact. That's why they're in court with Palin right now.

[charlieyu1]

There are more sophisticated techniques I’ve seen in local TV. Put two pieces of unrelated news one before another. Make sure the transition that nobody notices. This usually shed some bad impressions for the first news when done intentionally.

[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

"All you need is to be selective about what truths you tell, and where. Some goes on the front page, some on page 13, other bits nowhere at all."

Which is why, in a court of law, you swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", as selective truth is no truth at all.

[rndmize]

Oddly enough, I see no mention of any specific source in the article, yet the top comment here is bashing the NYT. Is there some reason for this? Does the NYT represent the entire industry? Are they alone in deciding what is news, or its priority? (One would be forgiven for thinking this is, in fact, the primary purpose of a news room).

Selective choice of facts would seem to be applicable here, as if the vast majority of news at the time was not in favor of the Iraq war and made few bones about it. Perhaps the implication is that as the "paper of record", the NYT is expected to be better than the WSJ, or the Post, or the various news channels? Honestly, is it even worth mentioning how there are now entire spheres of news sources that don't come close to matching even the fairly low standards of the old guard and yet seem to grow day by day?

If you have a problem with misleading news, lies of omission or absent context and your first thought goes to the NYT, I'd say you're missing the forest for a single tree.

[ncmncm]

NYT promotes itself as "the paper of record", holding itself out as the standard of truth. Its failings are thus similarly iconic.

[sophacles]

Another interesting way to lie with facts is to use one scapegoat as a factual example, but ignore all the other factual examples.

For instance, right wing hacks love to point out the flaws in NYT over and over on thier quest for "media is bad", while ignoring:

* they too are media

* there are just as many examples in their own organization and almost every other

*choosing to play dumb that they choose the examples as part of a targeted smear campaign

[orangecat]

use one scapegoat as a factual example

For instance, right wing hacks

Hmm