Suppressed evidence (Also known as the Error of Omission)

We are deliberately provided with only a portion of the correct information relevant to some event or situation, such as when an advocate of a particular claim or hypothesis ignores evidence contrary to his or her own position.

For example, a company chairperson, while making a submission to a local planning authority for approval to construct a factory or a mill, asserts that in the construction phase the company will employ x number of people, implying that the vast majority employed will come from the districts surrounding the site of the proposed development, all the time having plans – once the approvals are given – to bring in the greater number of the construction workforce from elsewhere (another state or abroad) as the company has already determined that it will be unable to source (most of) the personnel it wants from within the local community. A public official might state that he or she has only five thousand dollars in his or her bank account, by itself a true statement, while failing to mention their share-holdings' worth two million dollars. An advertiser might boast of the virtues of their cleaning product without disclosing that their major competitors’ products contain these very same ingredients. A media outlet trumpets that it has interviewed close to 200 survivors of (separate) plane crashes and that more than ninety per cent had a clear knowledge of and had ‘mentally rehearsed’ their emergency escape routes, while neglecting to ask what proportion of non-survivors had this same focus – perhaps it is only in a small number of cases that any such ‘mental rehearsing’ was a decisive factor in survival – without making the comparison what should we think about this 90% out of 200 figure? (consider, for example, the last of these ten questions)

A variant is the selective quotation. A sentence or a phrase is isolated and reported in connexion with some issue. The quoted words are accurate, but the position attributed to the actor is distorted or false (see: the straw man).

(see also: myside bias, topical incompleteness, background information)

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