On Facts in Politics

Political and ideological debate consists very largely of efforts to win acceptance of a particular categorization of an issue in the face of competing efforts in behalf of a different one; but because participants are likely to see it as a dispute either about facts or about individual values, the linguistic (that is, social) basis of perceptions is usually unrecognized.  The authoritative status of the source of a categorization makes his or her definition of an issue more readily acceptable for an ambivalent public called upon to react to an ambiguous situation.

Murray Edelman, Political Langauge: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail.

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