Subtle Lies
From time to time I come across a subtle lie, a choice of wording that implies something the author has no reason to believe other than his own bias. Here are examples:
Musk and Brazil
Months earlier, the judge had announced he was investigating Musk for obstruction of justice after the billionaire vowed to defy a court order blocking certain accounts on his platform as officials cracked down on misinformation spread on social media. (Sareen Habeshian on Axios)
That is what the judge claims. What Musk claims is that the judge ordered him to block the accounts of people some of whom were political opponents of the judge’s party. The judge has not published a list of the accounts he ordered X to take down. Musk has published a list supporting his claim but has no way of proving that it is true. Hence the author of the news story has no way to know which account is true — but writes as if she does. As evidence of bias, follow the linked text from “cracked down.”
What Vance “Admitted”
JD Vance appears to admit tale about Haitian immigrants eating pets is made-up as he loses cool with CNN host (Independent)
On CNN, he seemingly admitted that his claims were lies, then continued by saying that he would keep spreading such tales, even knowing them to be untrue, if they resulted in the media talking about issues he claimed were still just as real despite the deception.
What Vance actually said was:
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do,” said the senator.
And a little later in the interview:
“Kristen, I hear ya saying that they’re baseless, but I’m not repeating them because I invented them out of thin air. I’m repeating them because my constituents are saying these things are happening,” he said.
When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.” (NYT)
Snopes
Claim: Sen. JD Vance once called former U.S. President Donald Trump "America's Hitler."
Rating: Correct Attribution
Text below includes,
"Trump is America's Hitler." JD Vance (2016) from X by Bruno Amato
With no suggestion from Snopes that it isn’t true.
The support:
In 2016, Vance wrote in a private message to his former law school roommate: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"
Saying “I am not sure whether Trump is America’s Hitler” is not the same as, cannot be honestly quoted as, “Trump is America’s Hitler.”
Winning Over Swing Voters
Kamala Harris' Fox News Interview Wins Over Swing Voters: 'In Her Element' (Newsweek)
The implication of the headline is that Harris did well in the debate, increasing her standing among swing voters.
From the story:
Online monitoring and analysis company Impact Social reported that 20 percent of swing voters who watched the interview had a positive impression of Harris. In comparison, 30 percent had a negative view, with the remaining 50 percent neutral.
Impact Social noted that the net score of -10 is higher than Harris's overall swing voter popularity score of -16. Thus, they claimed the event "reflects an uptick" that "will likely have a positive influence on swing voter perception."
“In her element” was taken from a social media post by one of the people positively impressed.
It is almost certainly the case, given how many swing voters there are, that at least two of them became Harris supporters after hearing the interview, so the Newsweek headline is probably true. But the story does not support the conclusion it is obviously intended readers to get from it, that the interview was a success.
USA Today
Fact check: Biden did have the authority to declassify documents as vice president
It goes on to say:
Legal experts told USA TODAY that Biden had the authority to declassify documents as vice president as the result of a 2009 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.
Further down there is a link to the executive order. Reading it, you discover that it gives the VP the authority to classify documents, it gives any classification authority the right to declassify document he himself or his predecessor in office classified, but it says nothing at all about the VP having the authority to declassify documents classified by someone else.
The headline is literally true if “the authority to declassify documents” means “the authority to declassify some documents.” But the context was the discovery that Biden had kept classified documents after the end of his term as Vice-President and it was never claimed that they were all documents he had himself classified.
Nate Silver Predicts Path for Kamala Harris to 'Probably' Win Election
Pollster Nate Silver predicted on Saturday a path for Vice President Kamala Harris to "probably" win the November 5 election through the so-called "Blue Wall." (Newsweek)
The headline and the quote make it sound as though Silver thought Harris would probably win and do it through the Blue Wall. What Silver actually wrote was:
"If Harris wins the three Blue Wall States, she probably (although not certainly) wins."
That is not saying that she will probably win, it’s saying that if she wins those states she will probably win. Silver also said if Trump wins Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,
"it doesn't technically clinch the White House for him, but it probably does for all practical purposes—Harris would have to sweep all the other battlegrounds."
So the headline could as easily, and as misleadingly, have been about Trump as about Harris.
To get to what Silver said about Harris to any conclusion about how likely she is to win the election you would need to know how likely she is to win the three Blue Wall States.
… Silver said in his Substack post on Saturday that Harris has a 56 percent chance of winning Michigan.
Silver gave Harris a 46 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania in Saturday's Substack post.
Harris has a 53 percent chance of winning Wisconsin, according to Silver's Saturday Substack post.
If all three probabilities were independent, the chance of her winning all three would be the product of the three, or about .14. They are not independent, of course, but the probability of winning all three cannot be greater than the probability of winning Pennsylvania and that is less than .5, so, accepting Silver’s figures, the probability that she will win “through the Blue Wall” must be less, probably much less, than even, which is not what the casual reader would think from the headline.
Explanation?
All of the news stories are in various ways misleading. One explanation for some of them is that they are written by partisans trying to mislead their readers or themselves misled. That is a plausible explanation for the two stories about Vance and one about Biden, less plausible but possible for the two about Harris — the author might believe that if people think she is winning they will be more willing to vote for her. The first story, about Musk, could be written by an honest author who simply took if for granted that the judge’s claims were true, in part because they fit her beliefs about Musk, misleading media, and the need to crack down on them.
A second explanation for at least the last two is that the author was simply confused. There is no good reason to expect an author writing for USA Today to pay attention to the details of legal rules or one writing for Newsweek to understand conditional probability, no reason to expect either to think clearly or to care much about getting a story right.
An alternative explanation for most of them is that the objective is to get clicks, get more people to read the story. And a possible explanation for all the stories where what is wrong with the headline is obvious from reading the story is that headline and story were written by different people.
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I think that headlines are very rarely, if ever, written by the author of the article. Many years ago my wife had a job writng headlines for articles. After a couple of months she got "unhired" because she was working to hard to put the gist in the headline and not a "grabber" to get people to read it.
I guess one could expect a better understanding of probabilities by those who are writing about them.
When it comes to J.D. Vance statement:
“I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
It sounds like a verbal contortion to hide the plain meaning of ‘creating a story’.