Strawman

Other Names

Misrepresentation

Description

There are some debates that you cannot win. But if you have a captive audience, then faking a win is good enough. Strawmanning is when you give your audience both sides of a debate, but you misrepresent the other side by changing or omitting important details so that your position sounds superior.

This is commonly used by the media, because they know that their audience mostly only gets their information from a small number of ideologically similar sources.

Example

Mr Coolguy: We must cut our bloated defense budget so that we can afford the health care and education that we need to ensure adequate quality of life for all of our citizens.

Strawman version reported on Pox News: Politician Mr. Coolguy doesn't care about our national defense.

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