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Aswad -> RE: Canada Proudly Bans Free Speech (1/15/2012 9:17:44 AM)
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~FR~
Something caught my eyes near the start of the thread.
Lying is not a matter of true vs. false; it's a matter of intentions and good faith.
You can say something false without lying. You can tell a lie by saying something true, never once saying something false.
The universally recognized case, of knowing something to be false and claiming it to be true, is also a lie, but it's neither the most insidious, nor the most common form of lie. Claiming false things to be true is a sort of lie that is usually easily uncovered and often doesn't do much harm, compared to the more common, insidious lies. So let's just run through a couple of examples of 'worse' lies:
Let's say you have a car that you want to sell. It's a rusty accident waiting to happen, but you don't know it. As far as you know, it's a great car that has served you faithfully for many years, and you think it's still got good years left in it. When you sell it, you say that it's a great car, in good condition, but with a bit of mileage on it. That's not the truth about the car, but you don't know that, and you're not trying to deceive the buyer, as you honestly believe it to be the case. Thus, you would not be lying.
Let's say you have another car in the same condition that you also. In this case, it's just been to the repair shop, and they've let you know the damn thing should be scrapped before anyone gets killed. When you sell it, you outline the good points, and somewhere in there you bury a quick mention that it "has a bit of rust", then quickly move on to something else, making sure it seems like a minor thing. You're perfectly aware that you're misrepresenting the car to deceive the buyer, and thus you would be lying.
As a counterpoint, consider stories, particularly didactic ones and criticisms. Les Miserables is not a true story in the strictest sense, but it is not a lie, just a different way to convey the truth. Claiming that its story actually happened and that its characters are real would be a lie. Platoon and Full Metal Jacket aren't true stories, either, unlike e.g. Armadillo, although they are based on true events, but again they convey different aspects of a truth; they aren't lying. By contrast, Santa Claus is a lie, because he's an intentional deception and we know it. (Funny historical sidebar: the reindeer were a way to sell meat from reindeer imported from Norway.)
What Fox News is doing, is to portray things in a manner that deceives with intent, i.e. to lie.
There's nothing wrong with them lying, but they're not entitled to present it as news, which is what this case is about. I've no problem with freedom of speech being defined in a manner that does not include intentional deception (i.e. lies). Its purpose, after all, is to protect the right to express your beliefs and points of view, among other things to enable the truth to come forward, even when the truth is unpopular. It is not there to protect the right to intentionally deceive others.
We're not talking about bias here, but knowingly deceiving people with the intention of making them believe something that's not true.
And I would posit that it's not the least bit hard to make people believe something false by presenting them only with selected truths. That's been a mainstay of propaganda and PR for a long, long time, because it's harder to pin people for abusing the truth to tell lies than it is to pin them for saying things that are false and claiming those things are true. Also, it's a lot harder to backpedal out of having claimed a falsehood to be false, compared to backpedalling out of intentionally abusing the truth to convey a lie, as one can always just agree with the whole truth and acknowledge it, claiming the message conveyed was not the intended message (because it's virtually impossible to really prove what people's intentions are).
As a relevant, real world example, Norwegian politicians say Norway is not at war, and hasn't been at war since WW2. Clearly, with about 500 servicemen and attendant gear in Afghanistan, conducting armed combat against enemy forces, we are at war in any meaningful sense. But it's been played as a political card for a long time, until they were finally forced to give it up. Yet, even in doing so, they could backpedal by saying what they meant was that we aren't in a situation that qualifies as a declared war by the legal standard of such, despite the fact that they had been using it to propagate the idea that we were not actually involved in hostilities. In short, they lied, by telling something that is a truth under a series of assumptions that weren't disclosed until they were confronted with their deception by the media.
One of the most important tasks of the news in a democracy is to confront lies.
Banning them from propagating lies as news makes perfect sense.
Lies subvert democracies and the democratic process.
That's what Fox News is for.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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