A l'entrada del temps clar

The Ottolenghi - it is vital that you use 1g of this very expensive ingredient. It comes from a 500g bag with a one-week shelf life.

The time machine - 15-minute recipe! First, leave to marinate overnight...

The dishwasher - one-pot recipe! Now decant your ingredients and wipe out your pot. And again. And again. And again.

The optimist - cook the onions until caramelised (2 minutes).

The kindergarten teacher - get one nommable little tree of broccoli and bosh that into boiling water. Delish!

The brand names only - ingredients: Ritz crackers, Philadelphia cheese, Cool Whip, orange Jell-o...

The 1950s palate - use one (1) clove of garlic and a small pinch of chili flakes (omit if preferred).

Gentle, short introductions to media literacy and information literacy

(I keep kvetching about the absence of media literacy and information literacy...and kvetching is useless.

Signal > Noise will be the tag I use for short, digestible intros to concepts in both media literacy and information literacy.

Asks are open if there are specific topics you want covered.)

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2025-06-18

[Topic: Bias vs Lying]

Our discourse has gotten so ridiculous that we've mostly lost the ability to disagree constructively, think critically, or benefit from the work of smart people with whom we disagree.

We're so fractured and polarized that we routinely say stupid things like:

That source is biased, so it's not valid and nothing it says is true.

If everything is dismissed as bias, and bias is treated as dishonesty, then truth has nowhere to live - leaving us well and truly fucked.

Confusing bias with lying makes us cynical instead of smart. It turns healthy skepticism into hopeless nihilism

"All media is corrupt" isn't enlightenment - it's intellectual surrender and cowardice.

Bias ≠ Lying

A perspective does not prevent a piece of information from being true or useful.

What Bias Is

Bias is all but inevitable and unavoidable, even for those operating at the highest levels of journalistic integrity and discipline. It's baked into how we work.

Below are two paintings of Daniel in the Lion's Den. Same subject, radically different paintings. Is one of them more true? Is one of them less biased?

Maybe photography provides a better analogy. The angle, lighting, composition, saturation, brightness, contrast, and cropping all affect the final image. But the photo is still of a real object, isn't it? Is one of these six photos of the same man in the same room more valid than the other 5?

That's how all media works.

All media selects, frames, and focuses utilizing both conscious and unconscious biases.

That's not inherently deceptive - it's how all storytelling functions. Our brains are wired for narrative, it's how our minds work.

Bias can emerge from:

Cultural worldview (like Western vs. Eastern framing)

Political orientation (like left vs. right vs. authoritarian)

Institutional interest (like corporate vs. activist vs. governmental)

Professional constraints (like time limits, editorial priorities, sensationalism for clicks)

A liberal news outlet might cover climate change in terms of justice and inequality. A conservative outlet might instead focus on economic cost and individual freedoms.

Both might be factually accurate. Both are biased. Both have value.

More examples:

A conservative media outlet may emphasize crime statistics.

A progressive media outlet may focus on police accountability.

A US media outlet might frame a Middle Eastern conflict through geopolitics

A local media outlet might highlight the conflict through individual suffering.

All may very well be reporting true facts, but they frame those facts differently.

If you see journalism without bias, let me know - because that's what I'll read when I need to be put to sleep without learning a single thing.

Lying is a completely different animal.

What a Lie Is

Lying goes well beyond having a perspective. Lying is a choice to mislead - an intentional, deliberate falsehood.

Humans can lie with all media: words, pictures, headlines, graphs, statistics...even silence can deceive.

The key ingredient is always intent. Lies are designed to obscure the truth.

Types of Lies in Media:

Outright falsehoods: "Vaccines contain microchips."

Deceptive omissions: Leaving out exculpatory evidence to frame someone unfairly.

Fake sources or data: Citing studies that don’t exist, or misrepresenting real ones.

Image manipulation: Using photos or videos out of context, or editing them deceptively.

A biased report might emphasize some facts over others, but a deceptive one tries to convince you of something the producer of that media knows to be false.

Framing = Bias ≠ Lying

Framing is one of the most common and most misunderstood forms of media bias.

It's not lying - It's the rhetorical and narrative choices that shape how every story is told.

Examples of framing in headlines:

"Unarmed man shot by police" vs. "Suspect neutralized in police operation"

"Protesters clash with police" vs. "Police attack peaceful demonstrators"

"Israel retaliates after attack" vs. "Israeli airstrikes kill civilians"

The facts might not be in dispute. Someone was shot, a protest occurred, airstrikes happened, etc - but how those facts are framed shapes how we interpret them.

Framing isn't necessarily dishonest. It reflects the values and assumptions of the writer or publication. Understanding framing is essential for media literacy. When you learn to spot frames, you can wring an additional layer of information from the story.

Since it's Unavoidable, Make Bias Work for You

Expecting media to be perfectly neutral is like expecting food to be completely flavorless. It's neither realistic nor desirable. Without a perspective and a framing, a story ceases to be storytelling and our brains...mostly stop processing it.

Every outlet has an editorial mission, an audience, a funding model, a history - so bias is always baked in. That doesn't mean you discard the source. It means you read it strategically, looking for and identifying those biases.

Instead of asking, "Is this source biased?" know in advance that it definitely is.

Instead of asking yourself "should I read this news outlet and regard everything it presents as objective truth"...know that it definitely doesn't, you definitely shouldn't.

Instead, ask yourself questions like:

What kinds of stories does this outlet consistently choose to tell?

Who does the outlet consider trustworthy or quotable?

What kind of loaded language does this outlet use for different groups or events?

Who funds this outlet? Who is its audience? What agenda are they likely to have based on that funding model and target audience?

Bias isn't a disqualifier. It's a clue which tells you more about what you're reading.

Use Biased Sources Without Getting Played

You don't need to trust a source completely to learn something from it. In fact, the most valuable sources are often obviously biased.

1. Identify the Bias

Before even reading, know what kind of outlet you're dealing with. Look at its about page, ownership, funding/revenue model, recurring columnists, and core audience. Does it lean left? Right? Is it globalist? Nationalist? Religious? Secular?

Knowing this lets you anticipate the angle and spot distortions more easily. The more you do it, the easier it gets. After a little practice, you'll see clearly (for example) the huge right wing bias of the Jerusalem Post, the huge left wing bias of Ha'aretz, and how The Times of Israel is mostly pretty disciplined (in their news gathering and framing) about minimizing left/right political biases.

None of these three is perfect, but seeing their usual, institutional biases lets you read them against each other.

2. Use It for Contrast

Biased outlets often highlight stories others avoid or ignore. Fox News may underplay climate change but overplay immigration crime. Al Jazeera will underplay Hamas human rights abuses but spotlight in depth the most embarrassing moments in Israeli politics. The Jerusalem Post will underplay corruption charges against Netanyahu and spotlight the most depraved behaviors committed in the name of Hamas.

Use this to your advantage. Compare coverage across ideological lines. The contrast tells you volumes about outfit AND audience.

3. Look for Hard Facts

Don't quote the adjectives. Quote the data. What happened? When? Where? Who said it? What did the video actually show?

Stop taking an analyst's word as truth - see it as a lens to try on at look at the facts through. If the lens helps it make sense, put it in your back pocket for later use.

Strip away the spin, extract the structure.

4. Cross-Reference Across Angles

Treat each biased source as one side of a triangle. To understand the shape of a thing, you need multiple sides. Balance a left-wing story with a right-wing one. Add an international perspective. Compare them.

Over time, you start seeing the shape of the event instead of the biases of each outfit.

(If you're anything like me, you never want to see or hear another advertisement for Ground News...but still use it sometimes to do exactly this.)

When Bias Becomes Lying

Bias turns into lying when it refuses to admit its own existence or crosses into manipulation. You're dealing with deceptive bias when:

It claims neutrality while advancing a clear agenda

It actively suppresses or distorts opposing views

It refuses to promptly issue corrections or acknowledge errors

It flattens complexity into false binaries like good guys vs. bad guys

It consistently omits key information that would challenge its narrative

It's part of a disinformation campaign (state media, bad actors, bots)

Ask yourself these questions:

Does the outlet ever challenge its own side?

Does it interview or quote those it disagrees with...without distortion?

Does it foster critical thinking or does it push tribal loyalty?

Thesl answers will let you see lying much more quickly.

When evaluating a media claim, ask:

Is this verifiable?

Does this trigger a strong emotional reaction? Was that the goal?

What's missing?

Does this match the tone of propaganda? (overly simplified, emotionally charged, black-and-white framing?)

Is this story meant to inform...or to rally?

And perhaps most importantly:

Do I want this to be true because it confirms something I already believe?

Recognizing your own bias is more critical than spotting it in others. We are all vulnerable to confirmation bias, and most of us seek out what feels good while avoiding what challenges us.

Practice pausing. Breathe a few times between the click and the share. (Confirmation bias will be the topic of a future Signal > Noise.)

Vary Your Media Diet

To understand a complex world, you need inputs from multiple angles.

If you only get your information from one side, you're not informed - you're enlisted.

Real media literacy is not about being neutral. It's about navigating bias with awareness, curiosity, and courage.

That means reading:

Across ideological lines

Across national borders

Across formats (print, visual, audio)

It's not always fun, it takes some time, but it's essential and cwn dramatically reduce your susceptibility to propaganda -

...so go read smart, articulate people you disagree with!

Instead of avoiding bias, learn to read it. Recognize it. Use it. Balance it. Counter it. Triangulate past it.

And when you find actual deception? Name it and reject it.

That's media literacy.

I’ve been arguing with someone regarding the latest rumours that the IDF is rigging toys with explosives.

They keep bringing up the 1974 Nabetiah camp, but a preliminary google showed that reporting said the toys were clean and intact rather than dirty like the area they were in.

I’m just curious if you know the history of this claim?

They're conflating two claims and got both of them wrong.

Claim one is based a real event: the Israeli reprisal after the Ma'alot massacre.

On May 15, 1974, three DFLP terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon, murdered a family in Ma'alot, then seized a school and took 115 hostages, most of them teenagers. 22 students were killed.

In response, Israel bombed 7 DFLP bases, including the one at Nabatieh.

An estimated 27 people were killed and over 100 were injured.

That's the entire 1974 Nabatieh story. Terrorists attacked a school, Israel bombed the bases the attack was launched from. There are no toys in it. Nobody in 1974 alleged toys. The word "toy" appears in no contemporaneous account of that raid.

Claim two is a blood libel that didn't exist yet in 1974.

In 1998, Lebanon's permanent mission to the UN sent the Secretary-General a letter alleging Israel had dropped thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese towns, and it named Nabatieh as one of them. That, in 1998, 24 years later, is where "toys" and "Nabatieh" first show up together as an allegation.

Look closely at what that document is, because the people making the allegation never do. It is a Lebanese government submission that got assigned a UN document number, A/53/677, not a UN investigation, finding, or verification of anything. Getting circulated as a General Assembly document means someone filed it. That is the entire bar.

Consequently, the claim gets laundered downstream into "even the UN confirmed it."

The UN confirmed that Lebanon mailed them a letter. The letter also says the toys were dropped by fighter planes, which contradicts the 1990s field reporting that said helicopters. The allegation can't keep its own delivery method straight and dropping toys from jets is aerodynamically impossible.

Someone later took the location from the 1998 libel, stapled it to the date of the real 1974 raid, and out comes the meme your friend is quoting: booby-trapped toys, Nabatieh, 1974. Two unrelated things fused into one fake citation. The 1974 raid had no toys and the 1998 toy claim had no 1974.

The 1998 allegation never had any evidence at all.

In September 2000, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent the Foreign Affairs Committee a memorandum on landmines in South Lebanon, which the committee then published. Among real hazards like cluster bombs and shells, it lists "even booby trapped toys, allegedly dropped by the Israeli airforce."

The word "allegedly" is the FCO's own hedge. They were not asserting it, just logging an unverified category in passing, in the same memo that elsewhere insists Israel's minefield data still needed independent verification.

Later writers deleted "allegedly" and promoted a hedged line in a government department's memo into a verified British intelligence finding. It was the opposite of verified. Note that this is not even a Foreign Affairs Committee conclusion, which is the way it gets cited. It's a government department answering the committee's mail.

Now your own observation, Anon, which is the sharpest thing in this whole exchange. The toys in the photos and videos making the allegations look clean and intact, not weathered like the bombed ground around them, and the images themselves carry no date, no photographer, and no source.

Set those clean toys against what the allegation actually claims, that aircraft dropped these toys onto Lebanese and Gazan towns.

Objects dropped from a plane or a helicopter onto rubble and left outdoors do not photograph shelf-fresh.

So the claim has to choose - either the toys were dropped, and the pristine ones are props, or the toys are pristine because a hand placed them there, and nothing was dropped from anything. The reply your friend reaches for, that this is just what a planted lure looks like, doesn't save the allegation. It concedes the toys were set down by hand, which means no aircraft dropped anything, which was the entire claim. Clean toys can only decide here which half of this story is the lie - it's one or the other.

(Kudos, by the way - you clocked the forensic problem much faster than the people circulating the images ever did.)

A shred of truth: South Lebanon was/is genuinely saturated with unexploded ordnance that children can mistake for toys.

Cluster bomblets the size of a tennis ball, scattered by the hundreds of thousands, have killed and maimed kids who picked them up. That is real, documented, and a separate tragedy from the claim on the table - because the libel is not "unexploded munitions are dangerous to children." The libel is "Israel manufactures bombs shaped like Snoopy dolls and golden eggs and drops them to lure children to their deaths."

That specific claim, purpose-built toys deployed to target children, has never been forensically verified by a single independent body. Not UNMAS, not the demining NGOs working those exact hills, not Human Rights Watch, not Amnesty.

Even the alleged mechanics don't survive contact. The 1990s versions said the toys were dropped by helicopter, and a UNIFIL officer told AFP the objects could look like a toy "or have the shape of an ordinary stone," but no independent investigator has ever recovered, defused, and documented one of these purpose-built toy-bombs. Hezbollah showed local media a rigged Snoopy doll and some golden eggs. Nobody neutral was ever allowed to examine them.

Palestinian Media Watch says this libel runs on a schedule: poisoned candy, then exploding pens, then toys. Same accusation every season, that Jews engineer products to kill children - and these claims come straight from Fatah and the PLO.

The 2025 Gaza version is the same template. A Facebook post from a Gaza health official, sourced to unnamed police, no photographic evidence, and a viral image that traces back to a 2018 video from Yemen.

A real 1974 airstrike with no toys + a 1998 toy libel with no verification + a meme that grafts the date of one onto the lie of the other = modern blood libel.

You don't need anyone to deny this for it to fall apart:

The date comes from one event, the toys from another.

The letter says fighter planes, the field reports said helicopters.

The photos have no date, no source, no chain of custody and show neat, clean toys.

The claim can't agree with itself about when it happened, who dropped it, or how.

If you want to push back, ask which it is: 1974 or 1998, planes or helicopters, and where is a single dated, sourced photograph of one of these toys.

They won't have an answer, because the claim was never built to survive questions. It was built to be forwarded, retweeted, and reposted without thinking.

That, Anon, is an important difference between you and the person you're arguing with - you can think - and you asked questions.

Andrea Chénier (Tokyo 1961)

Andrea Chénier (Tokyo 1961)

Earless Monitor Lizard (Lanthanotus borneensis), family Lanthanotidae, endemic to Borneo

ENDANGERED.

Semi-aquatic.

Closely related to the true monitor lizards in the family Varanidae.

The only member of its family.

They do have inner ears, and are capable of hearing, despite the lack of ear openings and tympana.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.