Matthew Vadum Responds!

A few days ago, I took Scaife's braintrust to task for filtering out some important information in its smear against Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers Union.  (Note to Matthew Vadum: I am the only author of the blog post.  This is an easy enough fact to check.  It's written right at the top of the blog post.)

As part of the deconstruction, I stumbled across another similar filter piece from the keyboard of Matthew Vadum.

Well, Mr Vadum's responded in a comment:

This is a dishonest post. I didn't lie about anything. See: http://matthewvadum.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-mildly-dismaying-tale-of-lying.html

It's only fair to go see what he has to say.  But before we do, let's review the definition of a "Lie of Omission."  Roughly speaking there are two types of lies; lies by commission and lies by omission.  A "lie of commission" easy: it's a statement that's untrue presented as true.  A lie of omission is a bit trickier: it's a partially true statement presented as the complete truth.

For example, when President George W. Bush said "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." in his State of the Union address in 2003, he told a lie of omission.  Why?   Because while it's true that while British Intelligence was asserting that Iraq was looking to buy that uranium, American Intelligence was casting serious doubts on it.

See how that works?  Had Bush included that bit of information, it would have changed the entire meaning of  the passage.  So even though none of the statements he made as untrue, he was still lying - by omission.

And now we turn to Matthew Vadum.  Vadum admits that I accurately from his Front Page article when I quoted this:

To Gerard, it is not radical leftist agitation that leads to violence but capitalism itself. Economic “inequality,” he says, “leads to instability and violence.”

He then goes on to agree with basically everything I wrote - that Gerard was quoting and agreeing with that Vatican Report and that he, Vadum, omitted it from his piece because he "didn't deem it necessary" when he wrote the article.  Later on he writes:

I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what the "lie" was.

I can only point to the above discussion about lies of omission and then rhetorically ask how different Vadum's charge that Gerard was attacking capitalism would be if Vadum were to include the fact that Gerard was agreeing with a Vatican report when he did so?

See Matt?  That's the filer and that's the lie.  I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you.

Oh, and by the way, you might need to check again on your definitions of "quoting" and "paraphrasing."  You wrote about Gerard's use of the phrase "inequality leads to stability and violence" and how I was wrong to say that he was quoting the Vatican report - you assert that he was only paraphrasing it.

But if you were to read, carefully this time, my blog post you'd see this sentence from the Vatican report:

If basic morality fails as a reason to reverse these trends, then the Pontifical Council suggested another. Such inequality leads to instability and violence.

I know I'm only an amateur blogger and not a real live writer like yourself but that looks to me like a quotation and not a paraphrase.  Perhaps you can explain how using an exact set of words in exactly the same context with exactly the same meaning constitutes something that isn't a quotation.

And anyway, I find it interesting that you filtered out that exact set of words part in your blog post to your readers.  I guess old habits die hard, huh?

Now let me respond to onto your attacks on me:

• I was not high when I wrote the blog piece.
• I was not having a bad day when I wrote the blog piece.
• I have never received any sort of compensation from George Soros when I wrote the blog piece.

If you have any evidence that I am, in fact, lying about any of the above, I suggest you present it now.  If not, I think it's safe to assume that you didn't do much to help your defense of your journalistic honesty.