The Devil Is A Gentleman

I explain it first in this post, but I am lying to you constantly in snapping birch. Snapping birch is meant to simulate two competing PR campaigns. The NHL camp is lying to you. The Hollanov camp is lying to you. A lot of the information you receive is going to be inaccurate, biased, or misrepresented in some way. Because this is a fic about the internet, and that is what the internet is like.

A lot of the news sources in snapping birch are very biased in favor of the NHL. Because those news sources all have press passes that the NHL commissioner’s office can and will revoke if they don’t play nice. Or because they’re owned by a megacorp that also owns a fucking hockey team. Or because they’re just a conservative sports blog who’s just pissed that the hockey boys turned out gay. A lot of news sources have reasons to mislead you and they will do so shamelessly. And those news sources all have reasons to rush into the fray early and set the tone. But Camp Hollanov does not have a fucking newspaper at their disposal. They cannot put pressure on the news to report in their favor early, and the most unbiased news sources would be more careful about conducting an investigation in the immediate aftermath. They would be more thorough and follow up on sources because they don’t want to fuck around with a defamation suit from the goddamn NHL. As a result, a lot of the official news articles you see at the beginning of the fic display a heavy bias against Shane, Ilya, and Co.

When you’re reading the news articles in particular, don’t believe everything they tell you, especially if what they’re sharing can be construed as someone’s subjective opinion. Subjective opinions can’t really form the basis of a defamation suit—you need more objective falsehoods for that. “Hayden pike is an unremarkable player” is a subjective opinion. They can get away with saying it even if it’s not really true.

Inspect the language each article uses carefully. Does the author exhibit a bias towards one side? What language do they tend towards using? Is it inflammatory?

What would they have to gain by misleading you?

The article that line is found in is interesting. Because it’s a biased source interviewing an unbiased source. Most of that article is just them quoting a historian who’s spewing straight statistics and historical facts. There’s not much bias in what he’s doing, so the article appears mostly unbiased. But if you look at the scant few paragraphs that aren’t just quotes from the interview, that article displays a heavy bias towards the NHL.

Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

The hockey world took another blow this morning when the NHL’s first openly gay player, Scott Hunter, seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike on the NHL in response to its investigation into fellow gay athletes Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Hollander and Rozanov, who have long marketed themselves as bitter rivals, have been accused of concealing a homosexual affair to rig games against each other.

Immediately, the opening sentence should raise red flags of bias. The strike is framed as a “blow” to the hockey world. It’s framing Scott’s actions and the strike as negative from the outset. It wants you to favor the NHL.

The writer displays an implicit skepticism towards the strike. They’re trying to make the reader doubt its legitimacy and likelihood of success from the jump. Scott Hunter “seemingly attempted to kickstart a strike.” Like. Buddy, there’s no seeming about it. He said straight up “I am not playing until they are allowed to play” in conjunction with another player. The intention’s pretty clear.

But the writer wants you to be sitting there thinking how half-asses this attempt is. Look, we can’t even tell what they’re doing. Meanwhile, the NHL’s actions are framed with a neutral “investigation.” It gets none of the added negative commentary that Scott’s actions get.

Lastly, that first sentence implies the conclusion that it wants readers to draw. First gay player does this for his fellow gay players. Oh, okay. So this is just the alphabet mafia ganging up together.

There’s other descriptors that Scott, Shane, and Ilya have in common. They’re all top NHL players. They’re all NHL captains. They’re all recent Stanley cup winners. But the article doesn’t headline that. They want you to think of this “a gay man is here to back whatever the hell his fellow gays have done.” They want you to doubt the genuineness of Scott from the start.

Then go to the next sentence. The bias is again clear. The writer says that Hollander and Rozanov have marketed themselves as bitter rivals. They did this. It was their choice. It wasn’t their teams, who, you know, are in charge of most of the marketing when it comes to them in their official capacity. It wasn’t the NHL that modeled All stars weekend around their “rivalry” and just sort of told those two 19 year olds to show up to it. No, this was a lie that was personally marketed to you by Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Lie the blame at their feet.

Then you get to the end of the sentence. Shane and Ilya are not in a committed relationship of eight years, no. They’re concealing a homosexual affair to rig games.

The language is purposefully evocative of scandal. It’s not a relationship, it’s an affair. It’s not private, it’s concealed. It is meant to set you against shane and Ilya. From the first paragraph, you should doubt every opinion the writer of that article is sharing with you.

Now jump down to the sentence where Hayden is called unremarkable:

To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action: Hayden Pike, a mostly unremarkable left-wing for the Montreal Metros whose most noteworthy attribute appears to be his friendship with the scandal-plagued Shane Hollander, joined the strike within an hour of Hunter’s declaration.

Again, huge bias from the jump. “To date, only one player in the League has decided to answer Hunter’s call to action—”

Like Jesus Christ, what do you mean to date? This happened today. This happened five hours ago. You probably wrote that paragraph twenty minutes after Hayden joined the boycott. Some NHL players haven’t even woken up yet.

But the article doesn’t frame it like, “This is an unexpected and fast-developing situation. We are waiting to see how the League’s players respond to Hunter’s call to action.” No, it frames it as “oh my oh me, even now, we only have one person and he’s not even that good. Nothing remarkable about him, no. No, no, don’t think about how he’s alternate captain for the team that won back to back Stanley cups not that long ago. The only remarkable thing about him is that he’s friends with Shane Hollander. He’s only in this for his friend.”

Because the strike suddenly looks a lot better if you frame it as, “In a three-hour span this morning, the NHL lost three captains and one alternate captain from its three most recent Stanley Cup winning teams after it launched a hasty investigation into its two most decorated players.”

The words you pick matter. The impressions you leave the reader with matter. The writer of that article wants you to think it’s not a big deal if Hayden Pike strikes because he’s not even that good to begin with, and also he’s only doing this to help his scandal-plagued best friend.

Shane Hollander is not fucking scandal plagued. He’s got the cleanest reputation in the fucking league. This is one of the only scandals he’s ever been in. But they don’t want you thinking “fuck, hollander’s reputation is stellar, could he really do something like this?” No. They want all of those people who didn’t really watch hockey before this and who don’t already have an impression of Shane Hollander to walk away with the idea in their head that Shane Hollander is constantly finding himself in the middle of a scandal, so maybe there’s something to this one.