‘Let-Me-Tell-You-What-to-Think’ and Other Conventional Wisdom Tricks
2nd March 2013
The Other McCain pulls back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz.
The point he made, however, is that some journalists have an obnoxious tendency to assume readers are too stupid to spot their attempts at the “Jedi mind trick” of constructing a narrative framework within which carefully selected facts are construed in such a way that only one (narrowly biased) conclusion is possible.
You usually only notice that trick when (a) you’re sufficiently familiar with the facts to know that the selection and emphasis are not exactly neutral, and (b) you don’t share the writer’s narrow bias.
While this Let-Me-Tell-You-What-to-Think stuff is particularly annoying when it occurs as reporting, the same kind of sneaky highhandedness can also be observed in some opinion writing.