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Saturday, January 27, 2007

"TimesLies": Neil Lewis of the Times - Get The Wax Out

How to lie if you have an agenda (from Eternity Road):
one of the subtlest of rhetorical deceptions is the presentation of a non-representative case as if it were the norm. This is often accomplished by an unjustified aggregation of cases. Consider Thomas Sowell's classic example:

Did you know that 13 million American wives have suffered murder, torture, demoralization or discomfort at the hands of left-handed husbands? It may be as rare among left-handers as among right-handers for a husband to murder or torture his wife, but if the marriages of southpaws are not pure, unbroken bliss, then their wives must have been at least momentarily discomforted by the usual marital misunderstandings. The number may be even larger than 13 million. Yet one could demonize a whole category of men with statistics showing definitional catastrophes. While this particular example is hypothetical, the pattern is all too real. Whether it is sexual harassment, child abuse, or innumerable other social ills, activists are able to generate alarming statistics by the simple process of listing attention-getting horrors at the beginning of a string of phenomena and listing last those marginal things which in fact supply the bulk of their statistics. [From The Vision Of The Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.]


So we have Neil Lewis of The NY Times publishing "TimesLies" by saying (via JustOneMinute):
She testified that both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were intensely interested in Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV

But it turns out that there was no intense interest in Mrs. Wilson. Click on the link and read the transcript.
Except for 10 or 20 seconds when you recollect you told Mr. Libby and VP Cheney about Wilson’s trip and his wife’s role, you had no other discussions with either of them about Mrs. Wilson?
“Not that I recall.”

At no time during the talking points discussion, did you mention Mrs. Wilson? No.

What we have here is the editorial desire of the Times to create the impression that the Wilsons - as a couple - were the focus of the Vice President's office; that Scooter Libby was as focused on Mrs. Wilson as he was on Mr. Wilson and his lies about his trip to Niger. And this is simply false. It is as false as conflating people who murder their wives with those that have harmless spats.

There is a term for it: TimesLies.

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