Robert Sharp

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Trump's Particular Style of Bullshitting

20 December 2019 / / 0 Comments

Over on Twitter, CNN journalist Daniel Dale highlights Donald Trump’s “speaking mistake”…


Donald Trump has a particular style of bullshitting. He will assert something, and then qualify it with a “maybe” or a “probably.” Politicians the world over will obfuscate and mislead, but the way Trump does it is particularly noticeable. Its almost like he is a child, play-acting at being a politician.
Each of these qualifications — the “maybes” and the “probablies” — has a profound grammatical effect on the sentence. They render the assertion he has just made meaningless. But in the flow of a speech, the audience (and annoyingly, the journalists) don’t always pick up on the trick.
I’ve come to realise that this is the President’s way of trying to give himself plausible deniability for each lie. Those equivocations are Donald Trump’s ‘tell,’ the vocal quirk that betrays the fact that he’s just making shit up as he goes along. Every now and then I bookmark examples.
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Would It Break Journalism If Sources Who Lied Were Named?

10 December 2019 / / 1 Comment

Journalists Laura Keunssberg and Robert Peston have egg on their face this week, after they both breathlessly tweeted the news that a Tory staffer had been punched by a Labour activist in Leeds.
When video emerged of the incident, it turned out that no assault had taken place. One man accidentally brushed past the hand of another.
Both Keunssberg and Peston posted follow up tweets to apologise and share the video. But in giving an explanation for their inaccuracy, they enraged people further. Both journalists gave the excuse that ‘sources’ had told them it was true. Continue reading

Trans rights: a short case study in how the media spreads misinformation

14 November 2019 / / 6 Comments

Here’s an interesting example of how misinformation spreads through subtle misrepresentation of the facts.
‘Party refuses to let ‘gender-critical’ woman join’ reports The Times (£):

The Liberal Democrats have told a “gender non-conforming” woman who does not accept that humans can change sex to join another party.

This is accurate. The woman in question wrote an email to the Liberal Democrat’s, describing her views on transgender people and stating “I do not believe people can change biological sex.”
Someone from the Liberal Democrats responded. They recognised that the woman’s views on transgenderism were at odds with party policy, and politely told her she would be better off elsewhere. Continue reading

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