unSpun

by Brooks Jackson

  Research by Kathleen Jamieson documented the eye candy effect in 1988 and 1989. During the presidential election campaign of 1988, groups of voters were asked what they remembered seeing in news in the past week. In one week, ABC News correspondent Richard Threlkeld had debunked distortions in both an ad by Republican nominee George H. W. Bush and an ad by Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. To the surprise of the moderators, some ABC viewers could recall what the ads said, but not what Threlkeld had said about them. In 1989, Jamieson showed audiences the full twenty-two minute newscasts that included the Threlkeld piece and then asked the viewers to write down everything they remembered from Threlkeld’s report. Only thirty minutes after seeing the debunking, viewers still remembered the attacks in the Bush and Dukakis ads better than the reporter’s corrections. The reason? Threlkeld had illustrated his stories by filling up the screen with the political spots, while his criticisms were spoken.

  Just as Darman would have predicted, Threlkeld’s spoken words were overwhelmed by the provocative pictures and graphics. In the Republican ad, printed text specifying weapons systems the Democrat supposedly opposed was superimposed over video of Dukakis riding in a tank. In the Democratic ad, a Social Security card was torn up. Viewers failed to get Threlkeld’s message, which was that Dukakis actually favored some of the weapons the ad said he opposed and that the two candidates had the same position on Social Security.

  These days TV reporters who do “adwatch” stories are usually careful to avoid the eye-candy effect. That’s thanks in part to Annenberg’s research. Annenberg advised reporters to use special graphic techniques, showing the offending ad “boxed” in a cartoonlike TV set so that viewers don’t confuse the ad’s message with the reporter’s message, and imposing graphics over the ad to reinforce their points of criticism. But deceivers have learned a trick or two also, as we see in those pharmaceutical ads that use feel-good pictures to soften the unpleasant truth about the potential side effects of their products. Also, politicians have taken to slapping their slogans on banners and backdrops where TV cameras necessarily show them, so the speaker’s message gets across visually even if the news soundtrack doesn’t contain a single word he or she spoke.

  An example of that is President Bush’s appearance on November 30, 2005, at the U.S. Naval Academy. His message of the day—that he had a “plan for victory” in Iraq—was reinforced with banners above and below the podium. We can make fun of Bush for appearing in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” two and a half years earlier, on May 1, 2003, aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. That bit of eye candy was, to say the least, premature. But, regardless of what the reporters were saying about them, each of Bush’s messages was punched through by visuals that were powerful, whether or not they were valid.

  A message conveyed by “eye candy.” AP Images.

  Visuals also can be used to reinforce a false message that the deceiver can’t state outright. In 2005 the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America ran a TV ad showing a bombed-out abortion clinic and a disfigured victim, while the voice-over said that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts “filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber,” and adding: “America can’t afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence.” Roberts had in fact condemned clinic bombers and violence, but those powerful pictures transmitted the emotional message that Roberts had endorsed the mayhem being shown, even though the narrator stopped just short of saying that explicitly. FactCheck.org called that ad false and NARAL quickly pulled it off the air. Even the group’s allies criticized it.

  When you see dramatic images, listen to the “fine print.” Ask yourself, “What are my ears telling me about this picture?” A picture can indeed be worth a thousand words—but those words aren’t necessarily true.

  TRICK #5: The “Average” Bear

  SOMETIMES THE “AVERAGE” BEARS WATCHING. PRESIDENT BUSH sold his tax cuts to the public by claiming the “average tax cut” would be $1,586, but most of us were never going to see anywhere near that much. Half of Americans got $470 or less, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Bush wasn’t lying, just using a common mathematical trick. When most people hear the word “average” they think “typical.” But the average isn’t always typical, especially when it comes to the federal income tax: very wealthy people pay a very large share of the taxes and stand to get a very large share of benefits when those taxes are cut.

  To see the “average bear” trick clearly, consider this simplified example. Imagine a small town of a thousand persons, including one superrich resident whom we’ll call Gil Bates. Everybody in town is getting a tax cut this year: $10 for everybody but Mr. Bates, who is getting a whopping cut of $90,010. What’s the average? Divide the sum of all the tax cuts ($100,000) by the total number of residents (1,000) and the average works out to $100 per resident. But that’s not the typical cut. In our example, the average tax cut was ten times as large as the typical tax cut. Bush’s “average” figure was like that. Big reductions for a relative few at the top of the income scale pulled up the average to a figure higher than was typical for most working Americans.

  Bush also likes to point to increases in “average” income since he took office, as though everybody were enjoying improved financial well-being. For example, his White House staff issued a “fact sheet” in February 2006 that crowed, “Real after-tax income per person has risen 7.9 percent” since the president took office five years earlier. That figure accurately cites the latest quarterly statistics from the Department of Commerce, and it’s true that many Americans did very well financially during Bush’s first five years. But the average is misleading. Most of the gains were at the top, and many if not most Americans lost ground.

  We know that was true for Bush’s first four years, because for that period we have a better measure: a median figure, not an average. The median is the midpoint: half do better, half do worse. In 2005, according to a massive annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau, the median inflation-adjusted income per household since Bush took office had fallen by 2.7 percent, to $46,326. That’s a before-tax figure, not strictly comparable to the after-tax figure the president prefers, but the $470 tax cut we mentioned earlier (also a median figure) wouldn’t make up for the $1,273 decline in median before-tax income.

  Other statistics fill in a picture of upper-income Americans gaining while lower-income Americans slipped back during this time. The strongest of these is the poverty rate, which went up under Bush, from 11.3 percent in Bill Clinton’s final year to 12.6 percent in 2005. An estimated 5.4 million Americans fell into poverty, more people than live within the city limits of Chicago and Houston combined. This is a good example of why we say that the “average” bears watching.

  When you hear “average,” always ask, “Does that really mean ‘typical’?” A single number seldom tells the whole story, especially with something as big and complicated as the U.S. economy or the federal tax system.

  TRICK #6: The Baseline Bluff

  THIS ONE IS A FAVORITE OF DEMOCRATS IN THE UNITED STATES, but it works in other countries as well. In Britain’s 2005 elections, the Labour party plastered yellow “Warning” posters all over Britain claiming “The Tories will cut £35bn from public services.” Actually, the Tories planned to increase spending, by £181 billion. But that increase was £35 billion smaller than the one Labour planned, so Labour called it a cut. As the British television network Channel 4 put it on their own “FactCheck” website: “In nominal terms, therefore, the £35bn is just a smaller increase, rather than a cut.”

  The same trick is used over and over in U.S. elections. In 1996, Bill Clinton accused his opponent, Bob Dole, of trying to “cut” Medicare by $270 billion. Actually, Dole and Republicans in Congress had never proposed to reduce the amount of money spent on Medicare, merely to hold down the rate of increase. Their plan could only be called a “cut” in relation to projected future spending, what bud
get experts like to call the “baseline.” Clinton himself had proposed a “cut” of $124 billion in projected Medicare spending, without calling it that.

  John Kerry used the same tactic late in his 2004 campaign, running an ad saying “Bush has a plan to cut Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” That was simply false. Bush had stated repeatedly there would be no changes in benefits for anyone already getting them. What Kerry was referring to was a proposal, which Bush eventually embraced, to hold future benefit levels even with the rate of inflation, rather than allowing them to grow more quickly, in line with incomes. Over a very long period of time, that would mean benefit levels perhaps 45 percent lower than they would have been under current benefit formulas (assuming, for the sake of argument, that Congress enacted the tax increases necessary to finance those). But most of the future retirees who might experience that 45 percent “cut” were still unborn at the time Kerry ran the ad.

  When you hear a politician talking about a “cut” in a program he or she favors, ask yourself, “A cut compared to what?”

  TRICK #7: The Literally True Falsehood

  SOMETIMES PEOPLE PICK WORDS THAT ARE DECEPTIVE WITHOUT being strictly, technically false. President Clinton, who had an affair with one of his female interns, didn’t object when his lawyer told a judge that the intern had filed an affidavit saying “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.” Clinton later said that statement was “absolutely” true. How could he endorse the statement that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind,” given the shenanigans that actually went on? In his grand jury testimony of August 17, 1998, Clinton offered this famous explanation:

  PRESIDENT CLINTON: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is…. If “is” means is and never has been that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.

  In other words, there had been sex, but not at the moment when the statement was made in court. Clinton went too far: U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright later found Clinton in civil contempt for giving “intentionally false” testimony. (He also denied having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky.) His license to practice law in Arkansas was suspended for five years and he was fined $25,000. He also gave up his right to appear as a lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court rather than face disbarment proceedings there. But even though redefining “is” didn’t work for Clinton, his remark shows us how clever deceivers can try to mislead us without—in their minds, at least—actually lying.

  “Reduced fat” may be a literally true claim, but it doesn’t mean “low fat,” just less fat than the product used to have. “Unsurpassed” doesn’t mean “best”; it is just a claim that the product is as good as any other. “Nothing better” might also be stated as “as good but no better.” And the claim that a product is “new and improved” doesn’t signify that it is any good. What advertisers are trying to say is “Give us another try—we think we’ve got it right this time.”

  The Stouffer’s Food Corp. made a literally true but misleading claim about its Lean Cuisine frozen entrées in 1991, in a $3 million advertising campaign that said: “Some things we skimp on: Calories. Fat. Sodium…always less than 1 gram of sodium per entrée.” One gram of sodium is quite a lot. Dietary sodium is usually measured in milligrams—thousandths of a gram—and Lean Cuisine entrées contained about 850 milligrams. That’s about a third of the FDA’s recommended total intake for a full day, and too much to be called “low sodium” under public guidelines. The Federal Trade Commission ordered Stouffer’s to stop making the claim. Whether or not it was literally true, the FTC concluded, “the ads were likely, through their words or images, to communicate a false low-sodium claim.”

  KFC Corporation used the same sort of “literally true falsehood” in an attempt to palm off fried chicken as health food. One of its ads showed a woman putting a bucket of KFC fried chicken down in front of her husband and saying, “Remember how we talked about eating better? Well, it starts today!” The narrator then said, “The secret’s out: two Original Recipe chicken breasts have less fat than a BK Whopper.”

  That was literally true, but barely. The fried chicken breasts had 38 grams of total fat, just slightly less than the 43 grams in a Burger King Whopper. However, the chicken breasts also had three times more cholesterol (290 milligrams versus 85 milligrams), more than twice as much sodium (2,300 milligrams versus 980 milligrams), and slightly more calories (760 versus 710), according to the Federal Trade Commission. Not to mention that saying that something has less fat than a Whopper is like calling a plot of ground less polluted than your local landfill. The FTC charged KFC with false advertising, and KFC settled by agreeing to stop claiming that its fried chicken is better for health than a Burger King Whopper.

  And of course, Clinton isn’t the only politician to tell a literally true falsehood. In 1975, the former CIA director Richard Helms told reporters, “So far as I know, the CIA was never responsible for assassinating any foreign leader.” That was true, but Helms didn’t mention that the CIA had attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and a few other foreign leaders. As the then CBS reporter Dan Schorr later noted, “It turned out as Helms said, that no foreign leader was directly killed by the CIA. But it wasn’t for want of trying.” Another example: In 1987 interviews, then Vice President George H. W. Bush told reporters that he was “out of the loop” about the arms-for-hostages trade known as Iran Contra. Most of us would interpret “out of the loop” as “Nobody told me.” Bush once said in passing to CBS’s Dan Rather that he had a different definition: “No operational role.” A careful listener might have caught that Bush was denying only that he was running the operation, not denying that he knew of it or approved of it. Sure enough, years later a special prosecutor made public a diary entry by Caspar Weinberger, who was the U.S. secretary of defense at the time, saying that Bush was among those who approved a deal to gain release of five hostages being held by Iran in return for the sale of 4,000 wire-guided antitank missiles to Iran via Israel.

  When you hear vague phrases or carefully worded claims, always ask, “Are they really saying what I think they’re saying? What do those words mean, exactly? And what might they be leaving out?”

  TRICK #8: The Implied Falsehood

  WHEN THE UNITED STATES WENT TO WAR AGAINST IRAQ IN 2003, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And after the 2004 election, most Americans had the impression that President Bush had told them as much. The National Annenberg Election Survey’s postelection poll found that 67 percent of adults found the following statement to be truthful: “George W. Bush said that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks.” Only 27 percent found it untruthful.

  In fact, Bush never said in public (or anywhere else that we know of) that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. The CIA didn’t believe Saddam was involved, and no credible evidence has ever surfaced to support the idea. “We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in a CNBC interview in June 2004. But he also said he still thought it possible that an Iraqi intelligence official had met lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in the Czech Republic in April 2001, despite a finding to the contrary by the independent 9/11 Commission. “We’ve never been able to confirm or to knock it down,” Cheney said. To many ears, Cheney was saying he believed there was a connection, and that he lacked only the proof. In fact, after an exhaustive effort to confirm the meeting, U.S. intelligence agencies had found no credible evidence.

  Advertisers often try to imply what they can’t legally say. One marketer sold a product he called the Ab Force belt, which caused electrically stimulated muscle twitches around the belly. The Federal Trade Commission cracked down on similar products that overtly claimed that their electronic muscle stimulation devices would cause users to lose fat, reduce their belly size by inches, and create well-defined, �
��washboard” or “sixpack” abdominal muscles without exercising. In some of the most frequently aired infomercials on national cable channels in late 2001 and early 2002, sellers made claims including, “Now you can get rock hard abs with no sweat…. Lose 4 Inches in 30 Days Guaranteed…. 10 Minutes =600 Sit-Ups.” Launching what it called “Project AbSurd,” the FTC got those blatantly false claims off TV and got the marketers to agree to pay $5 million. (They had sold $83 million worth of belts, the FTC said.)

  But the Ab Force marketer persisted. He said his own advertising never made specific claims—which was true: it just showed images of well-muscled, bare-chested men and lean, shapely women, with close-ups of their trim waists and well-defined abdominals. And, of course, he had named his device Ab Force. The case went to a hearing at the FTC, where regulators presented some convincing evidence of how an unstated message can still get across. The Ab Force ads were shown to groups of consumers, 58 percent of whom later said the ads were telling them that the belt would cause users to lose inches around the waist, while 65 percent said they got the message that the product would give users well-defined abdominal muscles. The FTC’s administrative law judge ruled that the unstated message implied by the ad, combined with the Ab Force name, constituted false advertising.

  When the full commission voted unanimously to uphold the judge’s order, it said the marketer had managed to sell $19 million of his belts even though his ads made no specific claim. “It illustrates how false and unsubstantiated claims can be communicated indirectly but with utter clarity—to the detriment of consumers and in violation of the laws this Commission enforces,” the FTC’s decision stated.

  When you see or hear something being strongly implied but not stated outright, ask yourself, “Why do they have to lay it between the lines like that? Why don’t they just come out and say it?” Often there’s a very good reason: what the speaker wants you to believe isn’t true.