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February 09, 2009

"Facts that are Not Facts" in international politics

Relating a discussion about international politics, Carlos drops a wonderful quote: "Those are Facts that are Not Facts". For Carlos:

international audiences bond on their belief that the media lies/is biased. Then they disagree on what the bias or lie is (those facts are not facts).

This is a nice way of looking at things: for example, people may disagree on whether "the biggest problem with what went on in Iraq was the media lying about the lack of connection between Iraq and 9/11" (Carlos' example) or the key problem was the media lying about 9/11 being a 'false flag' US government operation - but they all agree that there are facts that are not facts.

Certainly, much of what is constructed as fact in the mainstream media has its factuality challenged; more occasionally, some of this is quite conclusively shown to be non-factual. It seems clear that facts that aren't facts are still something, though - they still exert political effects (as could be seen in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, with facts that *really* weren't facts about Iraqi WMDs).

If a fact is not a fact, though, I'm not sure what it *is*.

Posted by jon_mendel at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack