Lying, Part 2

In my Sunday rant, I forgot to mention that the big Huff-Po piece on the Peee-ew torture survey is titled Church Going Americans More Likely to Support Torture, which has nothing to do with the headline used by their source, CNN: Support for terror suspect torture differs among the faithful.

In other words, the study found a difference in support for torture among certain types of churchgoers--it's an internal comparison, not an indictment of believers vs. the body politic. But no matter--Huff-Po went ahead and announced that "church going Americans" are more likely to support torture, knowing that most readers would take that to mean "are more likely than the public at large to support torture."

For that to be true, support for torture among church going Americans would have to be greater then seventy-one percent. Was it? Nothing I've read so far tells me.

I always try to give the media the benefit of the doubt when it comes to misleading headlines--bad headline-writing is always a possible culprit. But it looks for all the world as if Pew wanted to find greater support for torture among the faithful and, when it didn't, went ahead and tweaked the data in that direction anyway. O, Lee of little faith? In this case, yep.

Integrity dictated reporting the data as is, not as Pew was hoping it would materialize. But integrity can't dictate anything unless it's there to do so.

Anyway, in this Internet-based era of misinformation as a matter of course, the only way to confront such lies is to do it aggressively. Which, of course, makes the confronter sound disingenuous or possessed of an agenda. The easier it becomes to state and spread a falsehood, the more the burden of proof shifts to those trying to convey the truth. So, the Internet isn't all good, by any means.