"they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting."
This is the core of the survey. I didn't see them or your parent mention lying. Although I have seen such blatant miscommunication of the facts that the resulting news is counter-factual.
An attempt to mislead is stressing some parts of the actual information and omitting or obfuscating other parts to promote a specific viewpoint. But not actually making false statements. This is literally what most of the layers do much of the time in court.
To me, this is a much lesser evil, as a rational person can detect the spin and probe for missing parts, which is what the judge and opposing lawyers work on.
Lying is a much bigger deal because it is harder to expose through rational exploration. Possible, but requires more external facts. In a court, a spin is a normal part of the defense, but being caught in a lie is likely to doom the case. My 2c.
Your grasp of English seems fine, to me.
I think your "quite different" distinction is incorrect. The distinction between lying and attempting to mislead isn't a clear one. There's a gradation from plain lying your face off, through mixing in a few truths with your lies, through lying by omission, through presenting true facts in such a way as to make the reader believe falsehoods.
The tactic most-used by newspapers is lying by omission. Newspapers routinely "spike" stories that aren't aligned with the paper's political agenda. You can search the paper's output, and you won't find a direct lie; but a parallel search for truth will also fail. Truth is to be found in the gaps.
> intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public
persuasion is not misinforming is not misleading.
This is literally the definition of lying.
You can intentionally mislead someone through the selective use of truths without using any "counter-factual" or untrue statements.
* used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression. "all their married life she had been living a lie"
Google "define lying". It says this:
tell a lie or lies.
and this
(of a thing) present a false impression; be deceptive.
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Intentionally misleading is deceptive, even if it states only facts.
> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war ...
