The media branch
6 Degrees of Manipulation
You don't need to lie in order to manipulate. Choosing the words is enough.
In preparation
The goal
To publish concrete, documented examples of how the official version of an event gets manufactured: what is told, what is left out, who appears as the subject of the sentence and who disappears from it.
We're not here to tell you the media lie. We're here to show you the mechanism with the evidence in front of you, so that next time you see it yourself. The point isn't to distrust one newspaper: it's to read all the others differently.
How a case is shown
The unit here isn't a news story: it's a case. A real event, plus the evidence of how it was told.
| Angle | What it reveals |
|---|---|
| Six outlets at once | The same story across six mastheads, side by side. Bias shows up the moment you can compare |
| The edited headline | The same outlet changed its headline hours later, without saying so. With timestamped captures it's the hardest thing to deny |
| Who acts | "Police charges" or "clashes". Grammar assigns responsibility before you reach the second paragraph |
| What drops out | The fact that was in the press release and never made the headline |
| Where it came from | How many outlets reproduce the same wire copy almost verbatim. Many "versions" are really one |
Two rules we apply to ourselves
No archived original, no case. Timestamped capture, link to the original, and a copy in an independent web archive. Headlines get edited and pages get deleted; if we don't save it first, we have nothing.
The same standard, or this is propaganda. Every case includes outlets sympathetic to our own position. If one we like manipulated a story, it gets published too. One case that makes us look bad is worth more than ten that make us look good.
What's missing before anything is published
This is the branch most easily attacked for bias, so it is the one that needs the most rules before it exists at all.
- Written criteria for selecting stories: why that event and not another.
- Written criteria for selecting outlets: who makes the six and why, held to the same standard.
- Quotation rights: how much of someone else's text can be reproduced and how it is attributed. Pending legal review.
- Always a link to the original, so anyone can check that we haven't cropped it to suit ourselves.