Misinformation

“ It is a pet idea of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists—wolves in sheep’s clothing—simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it—or rather, why they thought they did it; and to learn that, you should go to the men themselves. Their very falsehood is often more than another man’s truth. ”

“ She sat up very straight in my lap and sing-songed like a schoolgirl: "Where the objective of Cybernetic Democracy is justice impartially rendered, the objective of cybernetic journalism and of the World Press Association is truth impartially told. 'For you will be told the truth, and the truth will keep you secure.' Foof."
"Well, it's—it's true, dammit," I said. "You aren't, you of all people aren't, going to tell me that news isn't just as important as government! ”

“ By free argument and debate errors cease to be dangerous, if they are not exploded; but attempts to stifle even errors by power and punishment, provoke a stubborn adherence to them, and awake an eager spirit of propagation. If erroneous positions are published, meet them by argument, and refutation must ensue. If falsehood uses the press to promulge her doctrines, let truth oppose her with the same weapon. ”

“ To publish a malignant falsehood, and qualify it with a feeble, languidly expressed hope that it may be a mistake, or malicious misrepresentation of the press, should be poor consolation to a conscience not wholly seared by its own lascivious and free-love doctrines and practices. ”

“ Whatever tends to vitiate our literary taste, our morals, our religious or political principles, may be fairly at the mercy of criticism. So, whatever tends to introduce false science, false history, indeed, falsehood in any shape, exposes itself to the censor's rod. ”

“ I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary phase in the development of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult education which is our present concern. Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly. ”

“ Those who are masters in the art, advertise the biggest lies in their business, enter false accounts in their political ledgers with their broadest-pointed pens, launch their newspapers daily laden with untruths, and send preachers abroad to disseminate falsehood like flies carrying pestilential germs. I am a humble follower of these great ones. When I was attached to the Congress party I never hesitated to dilute ten per cent of truth with ninety per cent of untruth. ”

“ When therefore we observe such a claim, obtruded upon mankind, and the inconsistent circumstances carefully concealed from the eye of the public, it is our business, if the matter be of importance to society, to drag out those latent circumstances, and by setting them full in view, convince the world how ridiculous the claim is; and thus a double advantage is gained; for we both detect the moral falshood sooner than in the way of speculative inquiry, and impress the minds of men with a stronger sense of the vanity and error of its authors. ”

“ We are more careful than any paper in this town about verifying every statement we make, before we make it. If we should publish a single statement about anyone that was false even in part we would be suppressed. The judges, the bosses, the owners of the big blood-sucking public service corporations, the whole ruling class, are eager to put us out of existence. Don't forget this fact when you hear the New Day called a lying, demagogical sheet. ”

“ The same consequences follow falsehood and deception, whether practised by individuals or public governors, and they will both find in the end that they have been guided by cunning, and not by wisdom: for although the ignorant part of mankind may, to serve the temporary purposes of a bad government, be acted upon by false alarms of imaginary dangers, yet even these in time will see through the stale tricks and artifices of those whose designs are to gull and impose upon them. ”

“ To misinform them by writing only half-truths for the sake of retaining the good-will of those written about is as unethical, to my way of thinking, as it is for a newspaper to suppress facts which the public is entitled to know in order not to offend its advertisers. ”

“ It’s almost impossible for public opinion to form any kind of verdict based on actual facts. Newspapers nowadays use facts merely as the raw material of propaganda. They’re manufactured to suit the policy of the proprietors, or the purpose of Government. ”

“ Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will henceforward spread; and though we must suffer the external consequences of so prolonged a regime of lying, the lies are now known to be lies. ”

“ The public, without waiting to think or even to inquire after the truth, instantly selected as genuine the most false and the most flagrant of the fifty libellous narratives that were circulated of the transaction. ”

“ If you don't do it, and you publish any more of your stuff, we shall brand you as poor, mean, cowardly liars; as men publishing falsehoods knowing them to be so, and shrinking from the light of truth and investigation. ”

“ The public cannot be expected to know which is which, or what is what, any more in the case of news and views than in the case of tea and potatoes. Rather less indeed, since the ill-effects of false news and unsound views are, as a rule, too long delayed and too subtle to be attributed to their proper causes. ”

“ What unnatural and dangerous currents of opinion set in motion! what false alarms and malicious interpretations of words and facts! And in domestic affairs we are not much better informed than in foreign. As to commercial, industrial, and agricultural interests, political parties and social tendencies, or the personality of [42] public men, it is alike difficult to obtain a disinterested opinion. The more newspapers one reads, the less clearly he sees in these matters. ”

“ They are unpardonable sins against Science and Liberty and Progress. Any radical and comprehensive Falsehood, like Protectionism, practically contradicts the Truth at innumerable points. The test of any proposed truth is its harmony with other and acknowledged truths: the test of any suspected error is its contradiction to such truths. ”

“ Thus the void left by secrecy, by a concealment of the true nature and character of in- ternationally important matters, is frequently sup- plied by an intelligence service carrying distorted and colored versions of facts; all this confuses and discourages the public mind to such an extent that it becomes unable to sever fact from fiction and to form a consistent and firm judgment. ”

“ This class of human errors can indeed be corrected only by establishing in civilized countries practical and unequivocal systems of toleration; because, in that case, truth and reason are sure, in due time, to establish themselves, while falsehood and fraud must sink into merited contempt. ”

“ If they shall find anything proven to our discredit, with a full knowledge of the facts and circumstances before our minds, then such are at liberty to make known to the public their finding. We challenge, and have challenged, the press and our enemies to come and secure the facts, and with the assistance of these facts, and the records of our office, prove anything to our discredit. ”

“ Very often, the truth and public knowledge correspond. So the untruth/implausibility criterion leads to much the same decisions on specific conspiracy theories as our public knowledge criterion. Further, we acknowledge that there are downsides to our public knowledge criterion. One of these downsides is that this criterion is fuzzy: How many people, which members of the public, which public institutions, and what degree of conviction are enough to disqualify a belief as a conspiracy theory? ”

“ In regard to propaganda, not only do its interested agents fail to exhibit that rare quality, love of truth, but all too often they devote themselves to a consideration of the relative expediency of different falsehoods. ”

“ If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won’t do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. ”

“ Within the guild of the journalists, there is not a man who could not give you a hundred examples of deliberate suppression and deliberate falsehood by his employers both as regards news important to the nation and as regards great bodies of opinion. ”

“ And first, let us contemplate a common fallacy in men's opinions about human affairs, which pervades the several fallacies fostered by the political bias.
Results are proportionate to appliances—see here the tacit assumption underlying many errors in the conduct of life, private and public. In private life every one discovers the untruth of this assumption, and yet continues to act as though he had not discovered its untruth. ”

“ I will now show you, that not only can publications, containing false opinions, do no mischief, but that they actually produce benefit, and that therefore not they, but the prosecutions, which would check, and stifle them are injurious. Is it meant to be contended that error is stronger than truth; folly more powerful than reason, and irreligion than religion? ”

“ Calculated falsehood falls into that class of utterances which 'are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. ”

“ It is possible, however, to minds careless of verity or those dominated by prejudice, to distort facts by exaggerated statement, to deduce erroneous conclusions from improper handling of data, to make wilful and far-fetched conjectures, and to suppress illuminative information in relating incidents, — information which would reveal the true inwardness of a situation otherwise left dark and sinister. ”

“ Contemplated in a languid mood, or without original interest in the subject, that enormity of falsehood fails to strike, which, under circumstances personally interesting, would seem absolutely incredible. The outrage upon the intellect actually obscures and withdraws the outrage upon the facts. ”

“ But secret falsehood, which in the Lord's sight is the same as open falsehood,—secret falsehood, under all its various forms of misrepresentation, deception, cunning, is daily and hourly committed by how many? by how many, too, who think that they would scorn to be guilty of a direct falsehood? Look through the business world. ”

“ But in spite of the quick dissemination of news and the universal spread of education, it seems but a slow process for the really important discoveries of modern science to filter down through such media as the current periodicals to the rank and file of society. The situation seems to illustrate the old adage that a lie will travel round the world while truth is getting on her shoes. ”

“ The actual facts photographed themselves in a blur on the poor film of his brain, already impressed with the clear-cut picture of his imagination, until the composite result was a mental image in which fancy predominated. If a lie is the voluntary and conscious perversion of the truth, he did not lie. An untruth is a misstatement of fact due to ignorance or misconception. ”

“ I should not mention these things if it were not for this: that the evil reports live in some minds and, no doubt, are handed down to strangers. Here are the refutations to several such reports, but we push them aside. Can falsehood wound beyond the grave? ”

“ Another method by which the meanest people may do injury to the public, is the spreading of lies and false rumours, thus raising a distrust among the people of a nation, causing them to mistake their true interest, and their enemies for their friends: And this hath been likewise too successful a practice among us, where we have known the whole kingdom misled by the grossest lies, raised upon occasion to serve some particular turn. ”

“ Pretending to be purveyors of unbiased accounts of current happenings, they are in reality merely propaganda organs, twisting, garbling and suppressing facts and information in the manner best calculated to further the interests of the employing class. ”

“ Statements of belief or opinion are like hyperbole, as the majority agrees, in that they are not understood as actual assertions of fact about an individual, but they may be actionable if they imply the existence of false and defamatory facts. ”

“ Among the false assumptions that are made by many of the advocates of the "lie of necessity" is the claim that in war, in medical practice, and in the legal profession, the propriety of falsehood and deceit, in certain cases, is recognized and admitted on all sides. ”

“ Falsehood and truth are known to be inseparable, every where, but as rumour gains by distance, they are necessarily more mixed together in this country, than in regions where the comparative smallness of surface renders contradiction easier. ”

“ This science of deception has, of course, for its basis, the production of particular 'opinions,' and the creation of peculiar preferences in the public mind; but although the great contractors for political opinion are, of all the practitioners, the most perfect adepts, their modus operandi is far more difficult, and the secret of their power far more occult than in the case of the general professors or the charlatans. ”

“ In weighing the evidence, we must bear in mind that the greater public attention at present paid to such matters, is itself a source of error—is apt to generate the belief that evils now becoming recognized are evils that have recently arisen; when in truth they have merely been hitherto disregarded, or less regarded. ”

“ Carpenter that all new, marvelous facts shall be treated as impossibilities, and the witnesses who, without any other motive than the love of truth, attest them at the expense of their own popularity, shall be treated as impostors (which means, made personally infamous and consigned to the mercies of antiquated laws) , embodies all the impulses of stolid ignorance and malignity which have in past ages warred against science and innovation by prisons and by death penalties. ”