When the facts are true, but the story may not be

During a stay in Turkey, I found myself doing something I normally don’t do when I travel: watching quite a lot of local television. Not because I understood Turkish. Quite the opposite.

Whenever a news item caught my attention, I recorded a few minutes, transcribed what I heard, and translated it. At first, it was purely practical. I simply wanted to know what they were saying. But after doing this a few times, I realized I was watching something more interesting. I wasn’t just translating the news anymore. I was watching a way of seeing the world being constructed.

Israel was the most obvious example.

One report from Gaza covered an Israeli strike in which Palestinians had been killed. But the report did not simply begin by telling viewers what had happened. It opened with a statement: “Israel continues the genocide.”

That difference matters. Before the viewer knew where the strike had taken place, what had been targeted, how many people had been killed, or what Israel said had happened, the interpretation had already been delivered. First the verdict. Then the facts.

In other reports I heard the expression soykırımcı İsrail: “genocidal Israel.” The adjective was no longer describing a particular action. It was defining the actor.

Then I came across a different mechanism.

Turkish television was reporting on a massive wave of migrants trying to enter Ceuta, the Spanish territory in North Africa. At the same time, relations between Spain and Israel were badly strained over Gaza and Spain’s position on the Palestinian issue.

Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon had criticized Spain, essentially suggesting that instead of lecturing Israel, it should deal with its own migration problems. Spain’s Transport Minister Óscar Puente responded with a suggestive line: “Everything is starting to become clear.”

Up to that point, we had facts.

Then came the question: Was Israel behind the wave of migrants heading for Ceuta?

And that was when something clicked. There was no need to say that Israel had organized anything. There was certainly no need to prove it. You only had to arrange the pieces in the right order.

Spain supports the Palestinian cause. Relations with Israel deteriorate. A migration crisis erupts. An Israeli diplomat makes a provocative comment. A Spanish minister replies that “everything is starting to become clear.” Then the journalist asks whether Israel might be behind it.

The viewer finishes the sentence the journalist never has to say.

That is considerably more sophisticated than a lie. A false number can be corrected. A manipulated photograph can be exposed. An invented quotation can be checked. But what happens when every individual piece is true, and what is questionable is the connection being created between them?

A little later I encountered a third mechanism. This time it was a chronology of Iran’s nuclear program.

UN sanctions. Negotiations. International inspections. Uranium enrichment. The 2015 nuclear deal. The US withdrawal during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities. Assassinations of nuclear scientists. And finally the Israeli and American strikes of June 2025.

A chronology feels almost perfectly neutral. Dates. Names. Percentages. Treaties. What room could there possibly be for opinion?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

History contains far more events than can fit into a few minutes of television. Somebody has to decide where the story begins, which events make the cut, which are left out, and which event is placed immediately after another.

The chronology described the 2015 nuclear agreement and Iran’s commitment to limit uranium enrichment to 3.67%, far below the level associated with producing material for a nuclear weapon. Then came Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 and the restoration of US sanctions.

That sequence naturally leads toward a conclusion: there was an agreement containing Iran’s nuclear program; America broke it; escalation followed.

Those events are real. But so are others.

Years of suspicions surrounding Iran’s nuclear activities. Disputes with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Questions about possible military dimensions of the program. And, later, Iran’s progressive enrichment to much higher levels.

You don’t have to falsify any of these events to tell very different stories.

Start the movie in 2015 and you can tell the story of a diplomatic agreement destroyed by Washington. Start earlier, focusing on Iran’s nuclear activities, international resolutions and concerns over possible military dimensions, and you can tell the story of a nuclear program the international community was trying to contain. Start in 2018 and you can tell a third story: a chain of actions and reactions in which each side presents its next move as the inevitable consequence of the previous one.

The facts can remain exactly the same. What changes is the editing.

There was even a small detail that made me question the appearance of precision itself. The chronology attributed a decision in 2010 to George W. Bush, although Bush had left the White House in January 2009.

It was probably just a mistake. But that was precisely why I found it interesting.

A television screen filled with dates, maps and percentages, accompanied by the confident voice of a presenter, creates authority. We instinctively assume somebody checked everything before putting it on air. Not necessarily.

After several days of watching Turkish television, I began to recognize three different mechanisms.

With Gaza, it was language: the word told us how to see the protagonist before we were given the event. With Ceuta, it was association: real facts placed next to each other suggested a connection the facts themselves did not establish. With Iran, it was selection and editing: deciding where history begins and which events follow which can change the conclusion that seems to emerge from it.

All three had something in common. They didn’t necessarily require a lie.

That was what interested me most.

We tend to think about media manipulation in fairly simple terms. A news report is true or false. If it is true, it informs us. If it is false, it manipulates us. But there is an enormous territory between those two extremes.

You can decide which facts to show and which to leave out. You can decide their order. You can put an adjective before a name. You can place two events close enough together that our brains begin connecting them. You can turn into a question something for which there is not enough evidence to make a statement. And then you can repeat it.

When the same words, associations and categories appear day after day, they stop being merely a way of reporting events. They begin to build the framework through which the next event will be understood.

If I have already been told who the good guy is and who the bad guy is, the next piece of news no longer arrives on neutral ground. The ground has already been prepared.

But there is another distinction we should not ignore.

Saying that all media select, arrange and frame facts does not mean that everyone is equally exposed to their influence.

A dominant narrative in a pluralistic media environment is not the same thing as a dominant narrative in a system where alternative voices are weaker, constrained, or struggle to reach the public.

In a genuinely diverse media environment, one newspaper can tell me one story and another can tell me almost the opposite. One television channel can emphasize facts that another barely mentions. That does not eliminate manipulation. But it gives me something essential: the possibility of comparison.

I can read a pro-government interpretation and an anti-government one. I can look for an Israeli, Palestinian, Turkish, Arab, European or American account. I may discover that an event that received ten minutes on one channel barely appeared on another. Sometimes that contradiction itself forces us to think.

When media pluralism shrinks, something fundamental changes.

The problem is no longer simply that one journalist has selected certain facts. It is that millions of people can receive roughly the same selection, the same vocabulary and the same interpretive framework for years. Repetition then has fewer competing narratives to contend with. And the power to shape opinion becomes something else entirely.

So it would be too easy to conclude that what I observed in Turkey happens in exactly the same way everywhere.

The mechanism may be universal. Its intensity is not.

All of us can be influenced by the media we consume. But someone who has daily access to ten competing narratives has a defense that someone receiving predominantly one narrative does not.

Pluralism does not guarantee truth. But concentration of information makes it much harder to notice when we are drifting away from it.

And here precision matters. Turkey does not have an absolute monopoly on information. There are opposition outlets, critical journalists, social media and foreign sources.

But that does not make irrelevant the question of what happens when the state and media groups close to those in power have a far greater ability to determine which narrative reaches large parts of the population every day.

At that point, we are no longer talking merely about the editorial slant of a television channel. We are talking about power.

The power to decide which event leads the evening news. The power to decide which word gets repeated. The power to decide which facts are connected. The power to make an interpretation, repeated often enough, stop looking like an interpretation and start looking simply like reality.

And that was when my Turkish experience became uncomfortable in another way.

It was relatively easy for me to recognize these mechanisms because I was outside my normal environment. I was watching television in a language I don’t speak. To understand a sentence, I had to stop, translate it, and think about what it meant.

Without realizing it, I had inserted a pause between the news and my reaction to it.

In Spanish or German, I do the opposite. I hear and understand simultaneously. The words come straight through, without passing through the little customs checkpoint that Turkish had imposed on me.

Perhaps that is why I noticed something that usually goes unnoticed.

We think we receive information first and form our opinions afterwards. But very often the information reaching us has already been selected, arranged, labeled and connected before it gets anywhere near us.

I am not saying that all journalism is propaganda. Nor am I saying that everything Turkish media broadcast is false. That would be too easy, and it would contradict exactly what I had discovered.

Because many of the pieces were true.

There had been strikes. People had died. The migration crisis existed. Danon had spoken. Puente had replied. There had been a nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump had withdrawn the United States from it.

The pieces could all be true.

The question was who had decided which pieces to put on the table, in what order, and with which words attached to them.

I came home from Turkey with two conclusions.

The first: you don’t have to lie to shape an opinion. You can do it with true facts — by selecting them, arranging them, labeling them and connecting them.

The second may be even more important: how powerful that mechanism becomes depends on how many other voices are able to challenge the narrative.

I had an enormous advantage over the television in my hotel room. I could stop it. Translate it. Look elsewhere. Compare.

Not every viewer does that. And not every information environment makes it equally easy.

So saying that all of us can be manipulated is not enough. Of course we can. But we are not all equally exposed.

Propaganda needs a narrative. Repetition can turn that narrative into a worldview. And a lack of alternatives can make it increasingly difficult to recognize it as a narrative at all.

I came back from Turkey a little more suspicious of what I see on a screen. Including the screens that tell me exactly what I want to hear.

But I also came back convinced of something else:

Freedom of the press is not only about whether someone is allowed to speak. It is also about whether the rest of us have a real chance to hear someone who tells the story differently.