There's No Truth In The News

and no news in the truth...

There used to be a show called, The Unit. It was about a special forces team that essentially was meant to be Delta Force. One of the things that show dealt with was what the media said, versus what was real. It is from that show, that the title of this post came from and it might be wrong. The quote was either:

There’s no truth in the news and no news in the truth

or:

There’s no news in the truth and no truth in the news

Either way, it is an excellent quote that I tried to make sure I got correct prior to using it as my title, but now… I can’t find it anywhere. It’s like it never existed. The only mention my Significant Other and I could find was someone who used the quote on their LinkedIn, and someone on Quora also posted it, both of which read as the title that I originally used, so I left it be. However, it is pretty interesting that it is almost impossible to find. The Unit was not an unpopular show.

Anyway, the point of this post is exactly what the quote says. There is no truth in the news. The news, the media, lies to you, all the time, and they know that they are, that is the point. For those of you who aren’t aware of how staged what you hear on the news is, have a listen:

There used to be many more of these videos, but they have vanished from the internet. I used to have a couple of them, but I can’t seem to find them. It seems that when Sinclair Media had their reporters all read the same script back in 2018, that overtook the more interesting version of the many news stories repeated verbatim across many news stations.

Why is this important? Because what these outlets are doing is telling you what to think, and doing so using emotional manipulation and narrative control. If they all tell you the same thing is true, and you hear it everywhere you look and listen, you are more apt to believe it. If you are told repeatedly that something is not true everywhere you look and listen, you are likely to believe that as well.

The rule with the news tends to be this.

If they all agree that it’s true, it isn’t.

If they all agree that it isn’t true, it probably is.

Most people have very little time or interest to actually track down reasonable information. They want this to be done for them, and that is why they will choose to believe what they are told without question.

I get it. I don’t like reading studies, and I don’t want to be bothered with having to do extra work, I have a lot going on, but source material and biased slants matter. They are everywhere. I know a bunch of people are thinking, “Yeah, but my side is the right side, and it’s the other side that’s doing this.”

Nope and wrong.

They all do it, and they do it with each other even when they seem to oppose one another. There is a narrative that must be built and a certain level of emotional investment is required on both sides to keep that narrative going. I am going to use a pretty inflammatory example. I am using it because it will absolutely make many people have an emotional response:

The frequency of personality disorders in patients with gender identity disorder

I bet that headline made you bristle a bit, right? If you click the link it will take you to a graph that shows the comorbidity of personality disorders in people with gender identity disorder… or does it?

This is a graph that could be used by anyone to make an argument without them having a clue what the context of that graph is. This particular graph came across my purview because of my research into personality disorders, but like everything else, I wanted to know about the cohort and the methodology, so I looked.

Wouldn’t you know it, this graph is garbage. Not because there isn’t comorbidity between gender identity disorder and personality disorders. There may be an overlap there. I don’t know as it isn’t something I have specifically researched. I know that it isn’t something that this particular graph or the study it is attached to could have any input on, however.

How do I know this? Let’s look at how it starts:

Methods: Seventy- three patients requesting sex reassignment surgery (SRS) were recruited for this crosssectional study. Of the participants, 57.5% were biologically male and 42.5% were biologically female. They were assessed through the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory II (MCMI- II).

Ooo it starts off sounding very official and professional, doesn’t it? Let’s keep going.

Results: The frequency of personality disorders was 81.4%. The most frequent personality disorder was narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%) and the least was borderline personality disorder. The average number of diagnoses was 3.00 per patient.

Oh my… that’s a large overlap.

Conclusion: The findings of this study revealed that the prevalence of personality disorders was higher among the participants, and the most frequent personality disorder was narcissistic personality disorder (57.1%), and borderline personality disorder was less common among the studied patients.

That seems to be a small cohort for a study, but if I wasn’t so inclined to always be suspicious of studies as a whole I might be convinced that this was a good result.

However, I’m not that person, and hopefully, by the end of this, neither are you. Let’s go a little deeper, shall we?

Strong and stable preference to live in form of the other gender is the clinical symptom of Gender Identity Disorders (GIDs) (1,2). Based on the revised text of the 4^th edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), this disorder causes continuous dissatisfaction of the gender or feeling of inappropriateness of the current sexual role. GID affects social, occupational and other essential functions (3). The extent of prevalence of GID is not similar in different countries (4,5), and perhaps it is more widespread than what is presumed (6,7). The prevalence of GID is estimated 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 in men and 1:30,000 to 1:50,000 in women (8) and the sexual ratio (biological males to biological females) is between 3 and 5 to 1 (1). However, this ratio seems to be close to 1 to 1 in our country (9).

In a cross-sectional study, the prevalence of MTF and FTM GID was calculated as 1:145,000 and 1:136,000, respectively, and the total prevalence as 1:141,000. The sex ratio of MTF to FTM GID was 0.96:1 (12).

There are some researches on psychiatric co-morbidities with GID. However, the findings are scattered due to the differences in the number of patients, methods of sample recruitment and instruments. Studying psychiatric comorbidities in GID patients is important in several aspects:

Understanding these disorders contributes to clarification of GID nosology. Some scholars classified GID as a part of borderline personality disorder (BPD) (10 to 13). For example, Murray has suggested that GID in men is a presentation of character structure matched with Kernberg’s criteria for borderline personality organization. Transsexualism is even considered as a subset of borderline personality disorder (10). Seikowski et al. opposed to the correlation between GID and borderline personality disorder, regarding GID as a separate disorder, which may sometimes show borderline personality disorder symptoms (14).

Another important aspect of studying co-morbid psychiatric disorders in GID is helping the clinicians to make definite and accurate diagnosis. GID patients usually look for hormone-based treatment or sex reassignment surgery (SRS), but in many cases the patients asking for SRS have psychiatric disorders other than GID such as personality disorders which should be considered before surgery (1,9).

Furthermore, co-morbid psychiatric disorders affect prognosis, psychosocial adjustment and post-surgery satisfaction in GID patients (15,16).

All very wordy and seemingly clinically sound. Ignore all of it. This study was done on “patients” in Iran. In Iran, you cannot be gay. If you are a gay man you will be forcibly transitioned to being female. That’s the law. You cannot have a cohort studying gender identity disorder in Iran because there is no way of knowing if these “patients” actually have GID or if they are gay men being forced to be sterilized and live as women. The idea that any study would be done on GID in Iran is laughable. That’s like studying the Jewish work ethic in Auschwitz. There is nothing about that study that is humane nor accurate. The same can be said here.

I’m not interested in having a GID discussion in the comments section. That would be missing the point. The point is, this “study” has been cited by articles without the “journalists” bothering to look into where it comes from. It doesn’t matter which side of the argument they fall on, they base their stories on what they want you to believe, without the information that they are providing you being accurate. They decide what it is that you are supposed to think and will mold the data to conform to that information.

I have discussed the Gellman Amnesia Effect in the past, but here is a refresher:

You know when you are reading articles at an online site, and you come across one that is completely wrong. You happen to know that it is a trash article, because you are a structural engineer, and the article claims that the South Korean shopping mall that collapsed several years ago did so because there weren’t enough bunnies in the foundation, and you’re like… just what? That is not how anything works, anywhere in the world. I mean, maybe bodies in the foundations in Vegas, but that’s not the same thing.

Anyway, you know the article is trash because you are the expert. You have the education in that subject, you did research on the shopping mall collapse in graduate school, you find the whole thing ridiculous… then you go to the next page.

“Certified Nurses’ Assistant performs triple bypass on father with a butter knife on the dining room table during Christmas dinner”

and you’re like, “That’s amazing!” Meanwhile, all medical professionals are screaming at their computer screens that this is a bunch of BS!!! That’s the Gell Mann Amnesia effect. You KNEW that they were full of it with the bunny article, but then you turned the page and totally bought into the CNA being a heart surgeon. You forgot that these people are full of it, and on crack when it comes to what they write that quickly.

Once you find a source of information intentionally lying to you, that source of information should be suspect, always. There isn’t room to say, “Well, maybe this time they’re telling the truth. I mean, they have to be, because this story makes me feel a certain way, so it has to be true.”

If a story makes you feel a certain way, it is meant to. That is what they want from you. The same can be said for documentaries. Have you heard the notion that if you watch the show, Big Bang Theory, without the laugh track it isn’t funny? That’s true of a lot of sitcoms, but the same principle can be applied to documentaries, especially the ones on Netflix. There are some interesting documentaries out there, but those made by Netflix have a special kind of problem with them and that is the music.

It is so slanted to make you agree with their narrative, it’s basically painful. If there was the ability to turn it off I would guess most people moved by these so-called documentaries would just be annoyed by what they are trying to convince them of. Especially if you know the facts of a case. Keep in mind, documentaries are trying to convince you that they are correct, and that’s fine if they have an interest in being so, but if they have an interest in just getting as many viewers as possible, they will use all the tricks that they know to achieve that, and your emotions are a one-way ticket to that end.

Nothing is ever as simple as it appears. No one has exclusive rights to the truth. I can’t tell you what to believe about anything. No one should even be trying, but that is all I see now. A narrative push that is dialed in to all the things that are meant to trigger hardwired instincts and emotions to prevent the brain from looking deeper in. If you want to believe something. you are likely to believe it. Once you have decided what is true, it will be hard for you to change your mind despite evidence. Once you have heard it from multiple sources you are more likely to think that it must be true. After all, they can’t all be lying, right?

Wrong. They are, and they definitely decide what you will read, listen to, and see. “Journalists” have a special little trick that they like to use to be able to write whatever they want and not have any consequences for doing so.

Let’s say one outlet writes,

Athena Walker Eats Puppies

and they write a whole article that details how this is true. Another outlet picks up the story, citing the first outlet as their source, no independent fact-checking, and they put out their own article. Outlet three does the same thing, and now you have multiple outlets that are churning out the same information. By now, I have heard about the narrative, and I contact one of the outlets saying, “Hey, this isn’t true at all. What the hell?” They simply point back to the outlet they got it from.

However, they also talk to one another. Private online groups where journalists decide what to write about are very common. Now that I have called them on the BS, the journalists talk, and the first outlet takes the article down. They are the only ones that can be pursued for slander. Everyone else can simply say that they were citing outlets B, C, D, E, or F, and outlet B will cite outlet A which has already removed the article that made this claim. Everyone else has cover, and outlet A already got all the traffic.

There is no interest in you being informed. There is only interest in you being emotionally invested in a narrative that is designed as a means to an end. The moment a story makes you have an emotional reaction stop right there, and look into it deeper. Otherwise, you are just a cog in the same spin cycle that is the news currently.