Having watched quite a lot of video material from all sides of the political spectrum, which often tends to have a lot of distortions, fabrications, exaggeration and outright lies, one thought occurred to me: Is it possible to create a video (or other type of publication) that only presents well-established hard facts, but is still extremely misleading and fools people into believing falsities?
The thought occurred to me especially when watching snippets of professionally-made history and politics documentaries with big budgets and very high production quality. Documentaries that present eg. historical facts in a very straightforward and seemingly unbiased manner, feeling more like a history textbook.
The fact is that it actually is perfectly possible to mislead and deceive people even by purely stating well-established and accepted facts that are not under any kind of doubt.
And that's by being selective about which facts are shown and which aren't. Essentially, lying by omission. Hiding the wider context and nuances from the viewer by simply not showing them. Engaging in heavy selection bias. Building a false narrative by cherry-picking only the facts that support that narrative.
It's, in fact, surprisingly easy to give a completely false notion of something via selective cherry-picking of facts, and hiding other facts and the wider context that contradict the narrative. When done well, the documentary doesn't even need to explicitly lay out the narrative. Viewers will form the narrative on their own, when they are presented with carefully-selected facts (that are isolated from their wider context).
In other words, it's perfectly possible to deceive people into believing a completely false narrative without telling a single lie. Unless, of course, we consider lying-by-omission to be a lie.
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