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Measuring politician's misleading statements

POSTED BY: KPO
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:31
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Monday, September 3, 2012 2:24 AM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.


Read an interesting article about lies in politics that gave a method to measure how misleading a politician's statement is. It's necessarily subjective, but still useful I feel. I thought it could be an interesting tool for analysing the 'lies' of boths sides, and how bad they are.

Here's the method:

Quote:

1.What was the speaker trying to imply? This is necessarily a judgment call, but it's what gets us away from "lying" and instead focuses our attention on how badly a speaker is trying to mislead us.

2.What would it take to state things accurately? This is the most important part of the exercise. Without getting deep in the weeds (nobody expects politicians to speak in white paper-ese), what would it take to restate things reasonably accurately?

3.How much would accuracy damage the speaker's point? Obviously, if accuracy dents the speaker's point only a bit, not much harm has been done. If it demolishes the speaker's point completely, it's as bad as an actual lie.



The whole article goes on to apply the method to some of the 'whoppers' in Paul Ryan's convention speech, it's quite interesting: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/we-should-focus-deceptio
n-not-lying


I think he's pretty kind to Ryan on the GM plant.

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Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:31 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Very interesting, KPO. I'll have to read it over again (gotta go right now), but I found it most illuminating, despite of course being subjective. The GM plant thing pisses me off every damned time I hear it, but of course it's red meat to the base and they'll never hear the truth...

...about any of their lies, no doubt; and probably wouldn't care if they did. Republicans are running quite well on Obama-hate.


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