How to Tell a True Story That’s a Lie

“You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.”—Ricky Gervais, Humanity (2018)

I once watched a reporter cherrypick data in real time outside of Sherbrooke metro station. She must have asked a hundred people what they thought about the Grand Prix. Roughly half said they didn’t care. A little less than half said they liked it, and a small minority said they hated it (we’re talking single digits). Although there were but a handful of haters, nothing but haters made it into the nightly news story, melodramatically captioned: “Montrealers Furious About Grand Prix”. A truer title might have read “Mile End Journalist Hates Grand Prix”.‬

Remember that Canadian sketch-comedy show called “This Hour Has 22 Minutes”? Remember that recurring bit entitled “Talking to Americans”? I have it on good authority that the whole bit was based on the same sleazy technique. They would ask a whole bunch of Americans a question, splice together the most idiotic responses, and pass it off as a representative sample of Clueless America.

This technique has been weaponized in a rather egregious fashion by social media. If you believe that politician x or policy y is leading to an increase in _______-phobia or ________-ism, you can probably find plenty of cellphone footage on YouTube that supports your claim. But is this kind of footage of people behaving badly really representative of a broader social trend? Sometimes, I suspect that it is. Most of the time, I suspect that it isn’t. Most of the time, I’ll bet it’s little more than cherrypicked, misleading bullshit.