This Language Log post gives a much better idea of what’s going on. 28% was the number for “more than one” of the constitutional freedoms, which was later commonly misquoted as “one or more”. And, of course, there’s the matter of picking out a point of the distribution which is the most striking.
In other words: nobody is actually lying about the survey results. Instead, the falsehood is distributed along the chain: the press release states the results in a deliberately misleading way, and subsequent reports on it simply aren’t careful to avoid being misled.
The post you linked to argues that the poll and its original press release were deliberately designed to spin results and encourage misunderstanding, and that the error in subsequent reports was a deliberate goal on the part of the pollsters.
Deliberate spinning of statistics isn’t different from lying in method or result; the only difference is that they cover themselves by making sure their words are literally true.
Lying and deliberately misleading aren’t quite the same thing, although they have the same effect; I would expect the press to do the latter but not the former. So when you implied that the mass media reports did lie, I was confused and decided to dig further.
One practical difference is that, if lying is considered bad but things-close-to-lying aren’t, it requires a tertiary source to completely replace the truth by a lie.
They’re the same thing consequentially, but different under deontological and virtue ethics, so there’s a signalling convention that one is better than the other.
This Language Log post gives a much better idea of what’s going on. 28% was the number for “more than one” of the constitutional freedoms, which was later commonly misquoted as “one or more”. And, of course, there’s the matter of picking out a point of the distribution which is the most striking.
In other words: nobody is actually lying about the survey results. Instead, the falsehood is distributed along the chain: the press release states the results in a deliberately misleading way, and subsequent reports on it simply aren’t careful to avoid being misled.
The post you linked to argues that the poll and its original press release were deliberately designed to spin results and encourage misunderstanding, and that the error in subsequent reports was a deliberate goal on the part of the pollsters.
Deliberate spinning of statistics isn’t different from lying in method or result; the only difference is that they cover themselves by making sure their words are literally true.
Lying and deliberately misleading aren’t quite the same thing, although they have the same effect; I would expect the press to do the latter but not the former. So when you implied that the mass media reports did lie, I was confused and decided to dig further.
One practical difference is that, if lying is considered bad but things-close-to-lying aren’t, it requires a tertiary source to completely replace the truth by a lie.
They’re the same thing consequentially, but different under deontological and virtue ethics, so there’s a signalling convention that one is better than the other.