Thanks for this!
The hilarious thing is John Oliver does the exact same thing by carefully controlling the narrative on his show. =)
He started out very fair and objective, and turned into a regressive left mouthpiece. It was one of my favorite shows season 1 until he created his own echo chamber, just like he talks about here!
You can push almost any narrative without lying, simply by intellectually dishonest omission.
This is absolutely true. He did a piece on Daily Fantasy Sports and most of what he said was accurate, but he missed the forest for the trees, and afterwards it calls into question basically every piece he does.
I like to use steelmaning - something I first heard of from @neilstrauss and Charles Darwin-- to strengthen arguments instead of omission. Unlike a strawman where you take the flimsy version of a criticism, you take the strongest possible version of a counterargument and defeat that. The main issue for John Oliver doing that is time -- he only has ~10 minutes for his feature story. That's not really an excuse for blatant omissions and lots of strawmans, but it's hard to fully cover complex issues in a short time.
I still think overall he does a great job of pointing out injustice, but it's always worth digging deeper and looking into it from the other side.
I've never heard this term before, but it's my normal debate tactic. It saves a lot of time and effectively lets you argue both sides of the argument in "good faith", rending the debate process hopefully shorter. If my position isn't clearly superior to the "steelman'ed" one, then I know I may need to switch sides.