When we speak any language we say things relevant to the topic. If we mention something, listeners assume that what we say is relevant. If we violate these norms of behavior (and aren't blitheringly incoherent) in the wrong places it's simply perceived as lying. It's not. It's just a show of ill will and bad faith. "Telling the truth" is also a conversational norm. There are contexts in which lying is not considered all that bad because we pretty much expect lying.
Note that these norms, these "rules", are culture dependent. If you speak Russian or Arabic or Chinese they will be different from English in how they apply and where they apply.
Examples of relevance:
John: What time is it?
Jim: A bit past 6.
John: Yikes, it's date night! The grandparents will be furious!
It's incoherent, but understandable. No great stretch to realize that "John" probably has a date--with wife, with significant other--and will be late. He fears the wrath of the partner. Moreover, there are kids, and the grandparents get the kids on date night. We assume that the speech is coherent, meaning everything's relevant to the topic. The struggle is to figure out how things are relevant. IF you don't know how "date nights" work in committed couples, you're SOL.
John: Do you have 5 folding chairs I could borrow for a party this weekend.
Jim: Sorry. I don't have 5 folding chairs.
John: Okay.
Jim actually has 10 chairs, not 5, so he didn't lie. Jim will miss the subtilty of that point. Factually true but not obeying "relevance" strikes people as lying, but it's just abusing the norms we have for interpreting speech--and the norms people expect for producing speech.
HuffPo put two things together. Readers assume they're relevant to each other. They're not. HuffPo violated the principle of relevance. Did they lie? No. They caused us, manipulated us, to infer a falsehood.
Relevance is one of the first things to go on used car lots, courtrooms, and in politics. When winning is more important than communication and fairness, when winning is confused with fairness, when manipulating people is the goal, speakers go deaf to the norms of regular communication and assume that their listeners are too gullible to catch on. Many are. This should be taught in 9th grade English. It might be taught in college linguistics courses.
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