<em>All propaganda is wrong

There’s a great site about propaganda with step-by-step examples and small experiments to help you start approaching information with a healthy amount of skepticism. In order to be objective, you should have the same amount of skepticism for, and requirements for proof for all sources, regardless of whether you agree with the information or not. However, simply doubting everything you hear, regardless of facts, is also wrong (not to mention lazy).

I highly recommend this site because it spells out the kind of questions you should be asking yourself about everything you hear. In the Euphemisms section, they warn of accepting a changed label as an indication of change:

<q>In the 1940's, America changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense. Under the Reagan Administration, the MX-Missile was renamed “The Peacekeeper.” During war-time, civilian casualties are referred to as “collateral damage,” and the word “liquidation” is used as a synonym for “murder.”</q>

Other topics include Name-Calling, Bad Logic or Propaganda? and Unwarranted Extrapolations. To show how it can be used evenly, I found a good example (below).

I noticed What Really Happened claims to have caught Bush in a lie. The article includes an excerpt from a December 4th press conference (full transcript, look near the end) in which he:

<q>…saw an airplane hit the tower — the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, “There’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.”</q>

What Really Happened points out that, at the time, “[t]here was no live video coverage of the first plane hitting the tower”. This is true. They further claim that “Bush is lying through his teeth here”. This is an exaggeration. There is a well-known phenomenon called confabulation which would account for this as well. This is the fact that the mind has a tendency to fill in past events with details that never really happened. A study at Harvard had an interesting experiment:

<q>Participants saw slides of action sequences that contained “effect slides”; for instance, oranges on the supermarket floor or a person cleaning wine from a restaurant table. They later received a recognition test including “cause foils”; these were slides that had not previously been presented and that represented the most likely cause for the effect slides (a person taking an orange from the bottom of the stack or a person knocking over a glass of wine).</q>

The experiment concluded that “participants had a reliable tendency to make backward causal inferential errors” (which means they claimed to have seen slides that were never presented to them). In a far-easier to read article, How much of the world do we really see?, the possible causes of this are discussed in more prosaic terms.

It happens to everyone. Even those who lie about a lot of other things and are known not to be too bright, should still be given the benefit of the doubt.