Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off by doing a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season, the Biased Generalization Fallacy. Ok, do you want to hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what A Biased Generalization is? A Biased Generalization happens when you come to a conclusion about a group of people based on a small sample group that already has a bias about the topic.
The question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing a Biased Generalization is this: “Are the people they asked biased in some way?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 138.
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Alright we are winding down this miniseries on Propaganda tactics this week and today we’ll be talking about a tactic that falls under the category of Falsehoods & Distortions, which are techniques that attempt to fabricate the truth through lies, distortions, testimonials, repetition, or by focusing on just kernels of truth.
The propaganda tactic we’re discussing today is called Quote Mining. Quote Mining happens when someone removes a passage, statement or quote from its surrounding context in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. In simple terms, we would say someone is using a quote out of context in order to make it mean something else.
Here’s a simple example: Your friend Grace is telling you a story about a class presentation she had to do. She says, "My teacher told me, 'You're the best student in the class.'" But what if, in the full context of the conversation, the teacher actually said, "You're the best student in the class at drawing colorful posters." In this case, Grace used the teacher's statement out of context to make it sound like she was the best student overall, not just at making posters.Can you see how Grace took her teacher’s statement out of context and left out some of the necessary information in order to make it mean something different from what was originally intended.
Another example of this happens with reviews of movies. Movie critics will watch movies and give a review of the movie. Then, that review gets shortened into a short phrase that is used in advertisements for the movie. HOwever, these quotes are often used out of context. Here’s a few real-life examples:
In 2010, the Vanity Fair magazine reviewed the television show Lost by saying it was "the most confusing, asinine, ridiculous—yet somehow addictively awesome—television show of all time" But they were only quoted as saying "the most addictively awesome television show of all time" in the promotional material. Can you see how they took what they had originally said out of context?
The problem behind Quote Mining is that it’s intentionally misleading. It makes it look like someone said something that they really didn’t say. And often, people will Quote Mine in order to make things sound better or worse than they actually are, or to try to give credibility to whatever argument they’re trying to make.
Unfortunately, Quote Mining happens a lot with Scripture. For example, I’ve often heard people say, “Well the Bible says that ‘Money is the root of all evil’...” But is that actually what it says? If you look it up in 1 Timothy 6:10, it says this: “For the love of money is the root of all evil…” That’s a very different meaning! We can’t just pull out words from Scripture and ignore what’s around it. We have to take quotes and statements in the context they were given & meant in order to have an accurate understanding.
Question to ask yourself: “What’s the actual context that was meant in?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
