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As anybody who has ever wistfully imagined Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly fighting to the death over a pit of lava knows, most media outlets are biased. Usually it's not part of anybody's grand scheme to brainwash you, but rather just the result of newsrooms being staffed by fallible, opinionated humans. The problem is they're generally not allowed to come right out and say they think the subject of their news story is a flaming douchebag, so they have to rely on subtle and sometimes downright dishonest methods to gently sway you one way or the other. When you browse through the news today, keep an eye out for... #6.
Weasel Words
When someone uses language that implies a definite fact without stating it outright, they're using weasel words. The most common are when you attribute opinions to unnamed strangers. Ads include statements like, "Combined with diet and exercise, many experts agree that this pill could drastically increase the size of your penis and raise your credit card score." The "many experts agree" are the weasel words there.
How Can This Be Used For Evil? If you're writing a news story, and want to insert your own opinion, you simply attribute the opinion to some unnamed person or group. Such as "many people":
...or "some":
The writers do not explain who is saying, asking or arguing. Their friends? God? The homeless man outside ranting about the government stealing his thoughts? Who are these people and how numerous are they? What are their qualifications? We don't know, and in their own mind the reporter can always rationalize it with, "Well, surely there's somebody on planet Earth making that point. Why waste time actually finding them?" Weasel words can also be used in another way, similar to the way a Straw Man is used in a debate: to introduce an anonymous but supposed common opposing argument which the writer can then rail against, as we have here:
Dude, that is not the reason we're against letting robots operate on us. It's because they'll rewire our brains and turn us into slaves, as we have plainly stated many times. #5.
Implying Without Saying
As humans, we want to know the "why" behind everything, and we get frustrated when we don't have it. We see two things--a good harvest after we've sacrificed a virgin to the gods, or our luck changing for the worse after that strange man gave us a monkey paw--and we naturally think they're connected. Where there's correlation, we want causation.
This is particularly the case with bad news, which we are usually desperate to find a simple explanation for so that we don't wind up thinking that we live in a random, Godless universe full of cursed monkeys. This can be used against you, however, since a lot of persuasion techniques involve letting you fill in that gap yourself. How Can This Be Used For Evil? If you play video games, headlines like this drive you nuts: "Boy, 13, Fired Shotgun Into Cousin's Face After Playing Gangster Game". The "Gangster Game" of course being one of the Grand Theft Auto games. Or perhaps it's, "Teenager Stabbed at Midnight Launch of Violent Video Game Grand Theft Auto IV."
Nothing in these headlines is technically untrue, but in both cases you find out from the story that there is absolutely no indication that the video game had anything to do with the crime. In the first one, you can replace "playing gangster game" with anything the kid did that morning. "Boy Fired Shotgun Into Cousin's Face After Eating Cheeseburger." "Boy Fired Shotgun Into Cousin's Face After Watching Spongebob Rerun." Oh, they're not saying the game caused the crime--they have absolutely no way of knowing or proving that. They're just wording it in a way so that you have no choice but to make that connection yourself.
Never mind that the majority of young males play video games on a regular basis. If the attacker had even one edition of the GTA series sitting out at home, that shit goes right in the headline, baby! Otherwise you get a generic headline like "Teenager Arrested Over Stabbing Death," because we fall back to the normal rule that what that teenager did in his spare time is utterly irrelevant to the story. It's not that the news media necessarily hates video games, by the way. It's far more likely they just threw the video game aspect into the headline to grab attention, since it's just a random, boring crime story otherwise. Like when you see the headline, "Ex-prostitute 'still loves' Becks" ("Becks" being the cute tabloid nickname of soccer superstar David Beckham) you say, "Holy shit! Superstar athlete! Prostitute! Scandal!"
Only when you read the very, very end of the story do you realize that 1) only the woman claims to have had a relationship with him; 2) she wasn't a prostitute at the time and in fact; 3) had only been a prostitute once, for a couple of months, years earlier. Not many people will read that far, which by the way brings us to another common technique... #4.
Burying Inconvenient Facts
Let's face it, most of us don't have much time to read. If you get your morning headlines on Drudge or Yahoo! News, you almost certainly don't devour every word of every link. You browse headlines, you skim stories, you get the gist of what's going on in the world. For that reason, journalism schools teach writers to format articles like a backwards version of an M. Night Shyamalan movie: The only part worth seeing comes first. So, you have the headline which is written to grab you, even if it's mildly confusing (see "US Court Rules 'Zombies Have Free Speech Rights'"). And after that comes the first sentence or lede, which summarizes all the important facts of the story that follows ("A court has allowed a group of protesters dressed as zombies to continue with a lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.")
As the story goes on, the information supplied becomes steadily less and less important, a style some call the "inverted pyramid." They used to do this for stories appearing in physical newspapers where space was limited, because editors know it's safe to cut from the end without losing anything crucial. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyway. How Can This Be Used For Evil? Obviously if you're a reporter and you have a certain bias one way or the other, the method is simple: Just make sure that whatever facts contradict your point are buried. Nobody can claim you left the facts out, yet you know that most of the readers won't see them.
The most blatant, yet frequent, use of this is just flat out doing a headline that doesn't match the story. After all, people who surf portal sites like Digg or Reddit often read the headline and nothing else. So for example: A news outlet runs the headline, "The Internet Will Make You Smarter, Claims Study." Most readers will simply scan the headline, and miss the fact that 1) the "study" was just a survey of random people and 2) it was an "online" survey at that. That makes the study about as reliable as a poll on nuclear physics conducted via Tila Tequila's Twitter feed.
But at least the part that gives it away is near the top. That's opposed to this article from a Seattle newspaper with the provocative headline, "Police Insist: When Huskies Win, There's More Trouble." The "Huskies" here are the local college football team, if you were wondering, and headline seems to say that when they win, crime goes up. Holy shit! Better put a stop to that! The first hint that the headline might not be accurate comes in paragraph four (that "the stats may not necessarily bear it out") and the information that actually completely contradicts the headline's claim doesn't pop up until freaking paragraph eight (that this very paper did an analysis that showed no increase in police calls on game day, whether the team wins or not).
That's right; without changing a word of the article, the paper could just as easily have run the headline as, "Study Shows No Increase In Huskies Violence." Keep that in mind as you browse headlines today. |
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i see that angle thing used on republican ads on this site all the time using the angle to make obama look evil and s**t
angle trick is fail!!!!!!!
"innocent Vietnamese children running from napalm." child running after being hit with napalm after ripping of her clothing to try to remove napalm. This added to the idea of people with no morals, and a culture with sex object women that are married off young and or go into prostitution more easily them western women would--just a little context of the photo to the time it was taken, it didn't help people not want to be in the war.
It's funny that you use weasel words in this very article which tells me to look out for weasel words
"Now, _some may say_ that the first one is just blindly repeating the politician's talking points, but the second is flat out mind reading."
Good work!
"May say" is totally different from "do say." Saying "some may say" is functionally equivalent to saying "you may say;" it's hypothetical. But saying "some say x, y, and z" (i.e. "some DO say") is claiming that there are people actually saying those things, when in fact you're probably just making s**t up.
Nice try though.
tkmachine, you are arguing semantics, and poorly. It doesnt matter, the author actually does it more than once:
-- As the story goes on, the information supplied becomes steadily less and less important, a style some call the "inverted pyramid."
oo, oo, I got one...
6. Leave out important details about the intricacies of Foreign cultures when describing "Foreign opinion about America"
Iraq as it existed before 2003 was 3 ethnic/religious groups(Shia, Sunni and Kurd) being played against each other by a fourth group (Bathhists and SH's personal tribe). The fourth group lived off the fat of the land, was completely taken care of by SH and for the most part brutalized the other 3 groups, including genocide. When this cozy arrangement was done away with by the US, the fourth group was naturally pretty pissed and did everything in their power to bring back the good old days. Namely by conducting guerrilla warfare against US soldiers. The Liberal press conveniently forgot to mention these little details. Instead they cast all Iraqis as one h**ogeneous group while having the knowledge to go straight to the group that hated us and avoid the groups that loved us. (Especially the Kurds).
That's why you never heard stories coming from places like Erbil(Kurd) but lots of stories from Falluja and Tikrit(SH's hometown).
Well, the media is bulls**t......
I love how the word h**ogeneous gets censored.
"Liberal Media"
What a retard. Fox is pretty much the only "news" peddling the "all muslims are killers" bulls**t. That leaves me to believe you are wrong on a massive scale.
Great article....
The whole CNN-Osama thing was pretty funny
I love these guys
more people should read Craked articles
Good, but author is obviously biased for Obama.
Based on what, exactly?
There's no proof of that retard.
you want people to THINK you're implying you're anti-Obama, when you may or may not be.
You're putting this article/trolling to good work.
republi-fail!!
really i dont know s**t bout this conversation.
Fox News, especially on the website, is extremely guilty of #4. I can't count the number of times they take a news story from another source, cut out the good bits (and add in a healthy dose of all these other tactics) and count on the fact that their readers wouldn't bother following some link to read what they (assume they) just read.
Truly well-written.
the Jay Leno thing made laugh my ass off
made laugh my ass off too
Actually, the US only joined WW2 because Germany declared war on them four days after Pearl Harbor. Even with Pearl Harbor, most Americans wanted to stay out of the war.
Short Version: You have no idea what you're talking about. You've obviously never even read the German declaration of war, because it's pretty explicit in stating that open warfare had existed between the United States and Germany for some time before Japan's attack.
The simple reason why Europe was more important than the Pacific is that while Japan threatened colonies, Germany threatened capitals.
Here's the longer version: Way back in 1940, Japan signed a mutual defense agreement with Germany and Italy, forming the core of the Axis Powers. When Japanese forces took control of Vietnam after the fall of France, it cut off half of America's rubber supply. The US responded by placing an embargo against selling Japan oil (of which we had previously delivered over 80 percent).
At that point Japan realized that war with the United States was inevitable.
But we knew that we'd be at war before long, as well. The Plan 'D', or Dog memo, was written more than a year before Pearl Harbor and had already envisioned a 2-theater world war in Europe and the Pacific and posited that, should the United States enter the war, Europe and the defeat of Hitler's more dangerous army would have to be the main focus, while less resources would be given over to holding off Japan until European victory was accomplished. If we had focused on Japan first, we ran the risk of one of our Allies being knocked out of the war by Hitler's advance in Europe. We HAD to stop Hitler first, to protect our Allies, so that we could converge all of our strength on our enemies at once.
In the meantime, until the United States could find cause to enter the war, the memo recommended protecting the Western Hemisphere and keeping supply lines to Britain open by any means necessary.
To that end the Lend-Lease Act, giving material support for Europe, went into effect (nine months *before* Pearl Harbor). And in April of 1941, the US extended their protection of shipping as far as Iceland, as well as sending American forces to relieve British soldiers who had previously occupied and defended that island. We also traded ships and other equipment for bases around the world.
Around the same time, the USS Niblack engaged a German U-boat while picking up survivors from a Dutch shipping vessel, though neither vessel suffered loss of life.
In September of 1941 (again, STILL before Pearl Harbor) FDR gave orders for the American Navy and Air Force to shoot on sight any German war vessel, and in October of 1941 the President reiterated that this order was in effect. At least three American ships were sunk in combat with German U-boats *before* Pearl Harbor.
And right *after* Pearl Harbor, the Brits and the Americans agreed that defeating Hitler was to be the first priority of American intervention. America was ready to immediately plan for entering the continent, but the Brits recommended a strategy that divided Axis forces by attacking territory in Africa and the Middle East. Their plan also allowed more time for a build-up of forces in Britain that would be required to breach the continent.
The Japanese plan, from the beginning, was never to defeat the United States. Their hope was that they could set back American efforts in the Pacific long enough to secure a hold on the territories they wished to acquire, and then negotiate a settlement that would leave Japan with the natural resources that their home islands did not possess. The Pearl Harbor attack was only one small part of an orchestrated, Pacific-wide assault. Listen to the "date that will live in infamy" speech to hear FDR list all the places Japan simultaneously attacked.
Even without an official declaration of war, German U-boats and American Navy vessels were engaged in conflict in the Atlantic, and the U-boats were pressing closer and closer. The slaughter of Operation Drumbeat, the Nazi response to US Navy convoys, would have been more than ample justification to stop Germany before focusing on Japan, bloodlust and revenge be damned.
It was nearly impossible to keep the public uninformed about the damage the U-boats were causing. The creation of "Why We Fight" and the decision to release it into movie theaters also had a powerful impact on American attitudes towards war in Europe.
Hitler was quite happy to declare war on the United States, since the barely-open conflict in the Atlantic was affecting his plans to strangle the Brits into submission. His decision to officially declare war made it easier for FDR, but in no way was it the sole and only reason we fought Germany first.
Thanks for the information! My source must have been wrong.
Oh but feel free to spout your bulls**t Bazel. We won't judge you for it.
_Please_ tell me the CNN- Osama is dead or alive thing is fake.
I always hated the papers because they all have uggly methods.
Me too, that's why I always get my news from the most reliable source around... the internet!
Thanks Cracked! :thumbs:
WOW!! this is an actual eye opener for me..thanks cracked! this makes me more aware of what the news are actually saying =p
BAHAHAHAHA!!! the jay leno thing was HILARIOUS!!!
I'm surprised you didn't mention rape in the active/passive voice one. It's so common to see rape related phrasing in the style of "Woman was raped" rather than "Man raped woman." The first presents it as a woman's issue, something that just happens to women, something that's somehow natural and expected. Whereas the second puts the focus on the man, who actually made the choice to rape a woman, and makes it clear that this isn't something that naturally happens but that men choose to do and are responsible for.
Please... shut the f**k up
...it's been done before. you are a bit late to be 'enlightened'
Good point!
Your example probably has more to do with legal issues...(well, at least here in Britain.) A report that a "woman was raped" would probably be published prior to or during legal proceedings and this phrasing acknowledges a rape took place, or is alleged by the "woman" to have taken place. According to media law the accused would have to be referred to as the 'alleged rapist' until the trial is over until (if in this case the accused is male) he is either found guilty (at which point he'd be acknowledged as the rapist)or acquitted of the crime (at which point it would be libellous to refer to him as such). If a newspaper were to run a headline stating "man raped woman" they'd then have to elaborate by saying exactly who the "man" they are referring to is, thus assuming his guilt prior to any court judgement, contravening media law guidelines on crime and court reporting and leaving both the journalist and publication open to legal repercussions.
(See McNae's Essential Law for Journalists if you want more info on this type of reporting).
Shut up , b***h , or I'll f**king rape you !! Er.... I mean , saying things can sometimes lead to rape .... or perhaps "Annoying femme-agenda-woman opened annoying trap ; got fckucked ."
You make a good point, drink. You see the headline "Man stabs police officer" before the trial but never "Man rapes woman (is lynched by angry public)". Double standard.
Why stop at six? Celebrities comment on things they have no qualifications to judge, with great encouragement by the media.
The worst, however, is misrepresentation of statistics. Do you remember the story about straight women having a more rapid increase in the rise of the rate of new HIV infections than gay men? I know women who were alarmed by this because they thought their ODDS of getting infected were greater than that of gay men. It was a totally false comparison intended to take heat off of gay men for their high rate of infection. Explaining to the average person how they did this is often difficult, but here's a useful analogy: If I want to portray a high-powered sports car driver as less reckless than an economy car driver, I could simply point out that (at the moment this statistical snapshot is taken) the economy car is actually ACCELERATING FASTER than the sports car. But what I don't tell you is that the sports car bolted out of a changing light, left black streaks on the road, is far ahead of the economy car, is doing 80mph and still accelerating, while the economy car has only gained 10mph. But the economy car at 10mph IS probably accelerating at a higher rate than the sports car presently is. The same applies to this newspaper article. While it frightened straight women, the fact is that gay men at the time had a risk of being infected with HIV that was forty times greater than the risk of straight women. It was not convenient to include that in the article, nor were there enough figures included to analyze whether they were telling the truth. I had to dig up the extra figures. But most people are not only too trusting, they are also not experienced enough with figures to reason out how they've been lied to.
Here's another: In a comparison of seven developed nations, the U.S. government contributes less as a percentage of its GDP to education than do all the others. Tricks used?
1. GDP. Gross domestic product only counts the value of goods and services produced WITHIN a country, unlike gross national product that adds what you produce outside your boundaries to your wealth (Netherlands, it's shipping) and deducts trade deficits from your wealth. GDP is a false indicator of overall wealth.
2. The U.S. has an entirely different means of funding local public education. It comes from local property taxes, not the federal government. So what we contribute through those taxes was ignored.
3. We can actually BUY higher education in the U.S. This is not true in some of those other countries where if you don't make the cut as one of the intellectual, moneyed or influential elite...start reciting, "I like being a Delta..."
4. Probably the most important in any example is, who paid for this analysis? In this case, the American Federation of Teachers. The #1 teachers' union is the NEA, the National Education Association. NFT is #2 so they have to try harder. It's an ongoing effort to squeeze more money out of the federal government but more importantly, to keep themselves in the public eye.
You make a good point that stupidity plays into the scenario as well. For example, the statistic that straight women had a rise in the incidence of new HIV infections that surpassed the rate of rise in gay men is actually just a true statistic about the rise in new infection rate. Obviously, it may be misunderstood by some who don't read carefully or don't understand statistics and interpreted as an increased risk of currently being infected for straight women but I'm not sure that is an example of misrepresentation. Obviously, someone who has a problem with gay men could also interpret certain less bright people's inability to understand the correctly stated statistic in terms of their own bias and incorrectly state that by stating a true statistic the media were trying to "cover" for teh gay who must still be the epitome of that person's own prejudice and the vermin he always thought they were. (I'm not gay by the way - just in case you were considering questioning my motives)
So if the media makes a true statement that a significant portion of the population is too stupid to understand, that is really on the population and not the media.
This article is about the media misleading with weasel words etc. You don't seem to have noticed that the "fact" you dug up about the risk of "being infected" (which usually refers to having previously acquired the infection and currently being HIV+) is completed unrelated to the statistic cited in the article. We run into the phenomenon where people who are incompetent in a field such as statistics tend to be unaware of their incompetence and thus flaunt the fact that they were not able to understand the statistic cited and "dug up" an unrelated statistic to "refute" the correctly stated statistic. So, yes, people who are incompetent in the field of statistics will misinterpret statistics and often, as you did, make unwarranted connections to support their prejudices or belief systems. This is a problem with our education system and not with the media.
One of the biggest problems in HIV prevention is the perception among some women that HIV is a "gay disease" and something they don't need to be concerned about. A misperception that you've helped foster by not correctly understanding the statistic you are "refuting".
Actually, arjuna, it seems he does understand the statistic.
Sorry Arjuna, but i just have to say that I'm tired of some of us claiming the rest of us are moronic or less intelligent; as if those gifted few lived in some ivory tower of mental fortitude white the rest of us scraped at the dirt struggling to grasp the most rudimentary of skills. Yes, some are incredibly gifted, and some are complete freaking dirt-lickers. However, for the rest of us average joes, it isn't that we're stupid, we just don't have time to investigate the story further. I mean hell, that's what we pay these reporters to do! So yes, place the blame on those that lie to sell papers or push their view point. Inward reflection is important, but not at our unjust expense.
"I like to string together an incredibly complex series of words meant to confuse and distract the reader from the fact that I have no original ideas or thoughts on the subject, but would still like to feel superior to everyone else. I swear I am a genius in the field of statistics, but cannot construct three paragraphs on the subject that are interesting enough to grab the attention of someone who is a statistics major. By the way, did I mention how intelligent I am? The rest of you should pray for a fraction of the reasoning power I am blessed with, so you can all be arrogant a*****es too."
- arjuna108
@ arjuna. Your an idiot.
Fuck the five Ws; all media has to use is the "close sources" tag to get away with reporting anything nowadays.
You've actually used one of my favorite bulls**t media methods as your topic sentence: "As anybody who has ever wistfully imagined Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly fighting to the death over a pit of lava knows, most media outlets are biased."
Ah, the fake equivalence comparison. Rarely does a news day go by in this country without it being used. "Is cannibalism right for you? Two experts discuss, you decide." In this case, Keith Olbermann is positioned opposite noted luffa-enthusiast Bill O'Reilly. If you've never seen both of their shows you might think they were the same. But that would be ignorant and uninformed. To suggest they're opposite ends of the same spectrum is either stupid or weasel-like or both.
Not to mention another method... Phrasing in a way that forces the reader to agree with the premise of the writer. "As any reasonable person would agree, human baby flesh tastes better than chicken." or..."As anybody who has ever wistfully imagined Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly fighting to the death over a pit of lava knows..."
Or, it's a COMEDY article and the image of Olbermann and O'Reily, known rivals, fighting over a lava pit would be one of the most hilariously awesome spectacles in human history, and it's a common conception that they ARE opposite ends of a spectrum (it being the political spectrum) thereby having the topic sentence playing off of imagery created from the contrast of reality vs what people think is true for the purpose of humor. A technique otherwise known as sarcasm.
c-('.'c) Pow! Right in the kisser.
that's kinda cool. c-('.'c)