When political partisans promote their tribe by slinging suspect statistics, do you wonder who gets fooled when intentionally misleading factoids nonetheless gain credibility as they are repeated? Do you shake your head at the depths to which professional journalism has sunk when trash statistics uncritically lead the evening news?
It’s not so much the outright falsehoods that deserve censure. Most people are pretty good at spotting bald-faced lies, and if they miss there are plenty of others poised to yell gotcha. It’s the statements that are mathematically correct but bear no logical relationship to the conclusions that do the most violence to the truth. This is because most people don’t know they’ve been had. Which is the whole point.
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