[motohagiography]

Faster heustistic is to check not whether the facts are true, but if the implied conflict that connects them is real.

The old adage about how "dog bites man," may be true but it's not news, whereas "dog bites capitalist oppressor" is essentially all news these days, and it may even be construed as not entirely untrue, even though it seems obvious the dog has not developed class consciousness and thrown off the leash of exploitation and seized the means of food production in its righteous jaws of justice on behalf of the global oppressed, but by manufacturing the conflict that links the facts, an entirely contrived fabrication qualifies as not entirely un-true.

Simply, just ask whether the facts are used as decoration and plumage for what reduces to an extravagent lie.

[NikolaNovak]

Hi - where is that "dog bits capitalist oppressor" from btw? Google only has this comment. While I've been developing "news/internet literacy" for decades, I found it insightful to focus not just on facts but the spin and intent of fact presentation. Would love to read more if you've got some thoughts/links :)

[motohagiography]

Thanks! All of my comments are original content, unless I have plagerized them from much smarter people who tolerate my company.

It's more than spin, the basic unit of a story is a conflict, and you decorate it with facts. The question is whether the conflict is real, or produced by the logic of a presupposed idea (an ideo-logy). Instead of marxism in the example above, let's take the idea that the world is under the influence or control of evil forces, and you have been selected by God to thwart them, which seems bonkers from the outside, but it's also the theological basis of Christianity. (this is friendly fire) In that view, "dog bites man," becomes, "God smites man," because it has told the story using a conflict that originated in the logic of that idea. This premise that ideology can manufacture conflict that gets decorated with facts to produce stories probably scales pretty well. The decorative facts remain true and even legitimately associated, but the conflict that yields the story might have been fabricated.

Most of us believe that our ideologies are some version of the substrate of reality or the most encompassing set of intellectual abstractions. As I get older, I think the only reliable source of qualitative truth may be laughter because it's involuntary, but even then, that's mostly sentiment. Anyway, thanks for the prompt. Fun thoughts.