It comes as no surprise that candidates want to avoid discussing politically painful solutions during an election year, or ever. But there’s real harm in pretending that there are easy solutions to big problems, or that the problems don’t exist. Accepting the spin means letting the problems fester; meanwhile, the solutions become even more painful, or the problems overwhelm us entirely.
The Profits of Disinformation
Deception is highly profitable. Consider the case of one California huckster calling himself “Dr.” Alex Guerrero. He appeared on TV infomercials claiming that his “natural” herbal remedy Supreme Greens (containing grapefruit pectin) could cure or prevent cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, fibromyalgia, heart disease, diabetes, heartburn, fatigue, or even “the everyday ravages of aging,” all while promoting weight loss of up to four pounds per week and up to eighty pounds in eight months. A one-month supply cost $49.99, plus shipping and handling. And as incredible as “Dr.” Guerrero’s claims might seem, he sold enough Supreme Greens to drive around in a Cadillac Escalade. When the Federal Trade Commission hauled him into court he agreed to settle the case by halting his claims and either paying a $65,000 fine or giving the government title to his flashy SUV. And he was just one small-timer in the FTC’s bulging case files.
According to the FTC, “consumers may be spending billions of dollars a year on unproven, fraudulently marketed, often useless health-related products, devices and treatments.” Worthless weight-loss products alone have proliferated so wildly that in 2004 the FTC launched “Operation Big Fat Lie” to target them. As of October 2005, the commission said it had secured court orders requiring more than $188 million in consumer redress judgments against defendants. And since the FTC relies mostly on negotiated settlements, which are like plea bargains, that $188 million is most likely a fraction of the actual ill-gotten gains from weight-loss scams.
Deception Can Be Bad for Your Health
Deception is practically built into the business plans of some major corporations, and entire brands have been built on false advertising. Consider the long and checkered history of Listerine, for example. In 1923 the Lambert Pharmacal Company started marketing what had been a relatively ineffective hospital antiseptic as a mouthwash that could cure “halitosis,” a medical term not much used until Lambert’s ads made it a household word. Sales of Listerine exploded, going from $100,000 a year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927 and $7 million in 1930. But the ads were false: no mouthwash can cure bad breath. Bad breath has a variety of causes, including certain foods, smoking, gum disease, dry mouth, diabetes, and even dieting, which can’t be offset by any mouthwash. As the American Dental Association now emphasizes in bold print on its website: “Mouthwashes are generally cosmetic and do not have a long-lasting effect on bad breath.”
Other Listerine ads in the 1930s and 1940s claimed that the same product could cure “infectious dandruff” when rubbed on the scalp, a preposterous claim given that dandruff isn’t caused by infection. For decades Listerine also claimed to cure sore throats and to reduce the likelihood of catching colds. As far back as 1931, The Journal of the American Medical Association railed against such false claims, saying “by its very name Listerine debases the fame of the great scientific investigator [Joseph Lister] who first established the idea of antisepsis.” And yet Listerine kept right on making its claims, decade after decade, stopping in 1977 only after it lost a five-year legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark case, the court upheld the commission’s order to run a year’s worth of corrective advertising, at a cost of $10.2 million, telling audiences that “Listerine will not prevent colds or sore throats or lessen their severity.”
And still the spin continues. Listerine ads still imply the product cures offensive breath odor by saying it “kills the germs that cause bad breath.” That’s true but misleading. The germs come right back, as they always have. Lately, research has finally turned up a legitimate use for Listerine: it does slow the formation of dental plaque. But old habits die hard: Listerine (now owned by Pfizer) overstated its one virtue in a 2004 TV ad that claimed “Listerine’s as effective as floss at fighting plaque and gingivitis. Clinical studies prove it.” But the clinical studies proved no such thing, because they failed to ensure that the subjects using floss were using it correctly. A leading maker of dental floss sued Pfizer, and Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court of Manhattan ruled that Pfizer’s studies “proved only that Listerine is ‘as effective as improperly-used floss.’” On January 6, 2005, he ordered the ads off the air. Chin also said the ads might be causing real physical harm: “I find that Pfizer’s false and misleading advertising also poses a public health risk, as the advertisements present a danger of undermining the efforts of dental professionals…to convince consumers to floss on a daily basis.” We’ll have more to say about Listerine later, showing you how its advertising displayed classic warning signs of deception.
In extreme cases, commercial deception can cost lives. In May 2004, the FTC sued a Canadian outfit called Seville Marketing, Ltd., accusing it of deceptively advertising something called Discreet, supposedly a home test for HIV. Seville claimed its product was 99.4 percent accurate, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 59.3 percent of tested kits provided inaccurate results. These included both false HIV-positive results and false HIV-negative results. Buyers of Discreet would have done better by flipping a coin to see if they were infected or not.
It wasn’t until a year later, May 18, 2005, that Seville agreed to settle the case, with a court order prohibiting the company from selling its test kits or making deceptive claims. Seville also agreed to let the FTC tell its customers that the product didn’t work as advertised and that they should contact a health professional. The FTC offered no estimate of how many HIV-infected persons might have been lulled into a false sense of security by an erroneous negative reading. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that many people delayed treatment or unknowingly spread the virus to others because they were deceived by Seville’s advertising.
Prescription-Strength Political Bunk
Politicians deliver even bigger doses of prescription-strength deception, deliberately filling voters’ heads with disinformation about their opponents and about their own policies. One example is what we at FactCheck.org called a tax fable when it first surfaced in the 2004 campaign. The Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, claimed in a speech on December 3, 2003, that under Bush’s tax-cut bills “80 percent of the tax relief for upper-income filers goes to small businesses.” It turned out that Gillespie’s definition of “small” businesses actually included all partnerships, a category that includes the nation’s biggest accounting firms, law firms, and real-estate partnerships, and “businesses” that are really only sidelines, such as occasional rental income from a corporate chief’s ski condo. Gillespie was trying to support the argument that cutting federal income taxes for high-income individuals translates at least in part to a tax cut for small businesses, stimulating hiring and thus helping some lower-income workers, too. But Gillespie was counting every rich person who got even a dollar in income from a small business as a “small-business owner”—and counting every dollar of tax benefit they received as relief for small business. Under that preposterous definition President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both qualified as “small businesses,” by virtue of $84 Bush received from an oil-drilling partnership, and the consulting income of Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Neither “business” was a notable job producer.
The Bush campaign would use the same twisted reasoning in a TV ad against John Kerry, claiming that Kerry’s proposal to scale back Bush’s tax cuts for those making $200,000 a year or more would mean “900,000 small business owners would pay higher tax rates than most multinational corporations.” In fact, according to analysis by the Tax Policy Center (a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution) the max
imum number of small-business owners who could be affected—even by $1—was barely more than half the number the Bush ad claimed.
Voters Deceived
Not all voters are taken in by political snake oil, but many are. How many may surprise you. Bush’s claim that Kerry’s tax increase would have hit 900,000 small-business owners, for example, was found either “somewhat truthful” or “very truthful” by 62 percent of Americans polled after the 2004 election by the National Annenberg Election Survey. Only 24 percent found the statement “not too truthful” or “not truthful at all,” and the rest didn’t know or didn’t answer. That means that of those who had an opinion, two and a half times as many had the wrong idea as had the right one.
The deception took in members of both parties, though of course not equally. Unsurprisingly, Republicans were more inclined to believe the Republican president’s deception than were Democrats. Among Republicans, 76 percent found the claim truthful. But 64 percent of independents also found it truthful, and—what is surprising—nearly half of all Democrats did too. Forty-nine percent of them were inclined to believe Bush’s unfounded claim that their own candidate would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses.
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Dubious Campaign Claims Most Americans Believed
KERRY CLAIM: The new jobs created since George W. Bush became president pay, on average, $9,000 a year less than the jobs they replaced.
BUSH CLAIM: John Kerry's tax plan would increase taxes on 900,000 small-business owners.
Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. National telephone poll of adults Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample sizes: 1,669 for Kerry question, 1,731 for Bush question. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/- 2.4 percentage points.
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Kerry deceived plenty of voters himself. Throughout the campaign he hammered away at the idea that the economy, which was finally creating hundreds of thousands of jobs after losing 2.6 million of them during Bush’s first two and a half years in office, wasn’t producing good jobs. Kerry insisted that the new jobs were paying thousands of dollars less than the old jobs that had disappeared, and he even claimed economists could measure the gap precisely. He said it in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention and kept repeating it right through the third presidential debate, where he said, “The jobs the president is creating pay nine thousand dollars less than the jobs that we’re losing.”
That $9,000 figure was fanciful. It didn’t actually compare the wages of lost jobs to those of newer jobs, because nobody gathers statistics in a way that allows such precise job-to-job comparisons. We know of no reputable economist who endorsed Kerry’s figure, and quite a few who thought it was silly and misleading.
The existing evidence was mixed. One set of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that grouped workers into different industries—manufacturing, for example, or health care—did suggest that job quality was declining. But that analysis was contradicted by a separate set of BLS figures, based on a different survey and grouping workers by occupation: doctor, nurse, assembly-line worker, engineer. The second set of figures suggested that job quality was improving. The Brookings Institution economist Barry Bosworth, a former Carter administration official, called Kerry’s approach “very misleading,” and added: “We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to compare the rates of jobs lost to those gained because we just don’t have the information right now to do it. Trying to measure the gross flow of jobs is really futile.” And, we wish to add, deceptive.
Bogus as Kerry’s claim was, two of every three persons polled after the election said they found it truthful. And that even included a majority of those who said they voted for Bush: 56 percent of them believed Kerry’s baseless claim that new jobs paid $9,000 less than the old jobs.
Bush’s Pack of…Wolves
Political deceivers don’t always state their falsehoods outright; sometimes they merely imply them. But the effect can be just as bad. Our polling found that voters went to cast their ballots burdened by a severely distorted picture of both candidates, often because of deceptions subtly laid between the lines.
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Misleading TV Ad
Announcer: In an increasingly dangerous world—even after the first terrorist attack on America—John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations. By six billion dollars—cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.
(On screen: several wolves eye the camera, as if preparing to attack.)
Bush: I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.
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For example, one of the most deceptive ads of the 2004 campaign was a Bush commercial showing a pack of wolves, symbolizing terrorists about to attack. The announcer said Kerry had voted to cut intelligence spending “even after the first terrorist attack on America.” We don’t know whether that was intended to deceive, but it did. The “first attack” referred to was the truck bomb that went off in the parking garage under one of the World Trade Center towers more than a decade earlier—in 1993. But we spoke to many casual viewers who heard “first terrorist attack” and automatically thought of the first aircraft to hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, a terrifying event still vivid in voters’ memories.
The truth is that Kerry was supporting regular increases in intelligence spending for several years prior to the attacks of September 11. But our postelection polling shows most citizens—55 percent—found the statement that Kerry voted for intelligence cuts after September 11 to be “truthful.” That false notion may have cost Kerry votes. And we believe the false picture of Kerry foolishly trying to cut intelligence spending, even after a terrorist attack that U.S. intelligence had failed to prevent, was encouraged by the wording of Bush’s ad and others like it.
The “Wolves” ad was deceptive in more direct ways as well. It said Kerry voted to “slash” intelligence spending by $6 billion, “cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses.” In truth, what Kerry supported was a $1 billion cut (as part of a much broader deficit-reduction package), which would have continued for five years. It amounted to a mere 3.7 percent of total intelligence spending. Would that have “weakened America’s defenses” as the ad claimed? In 1995, when he was a Republican congressman, Bush’s own CIA director Porter Goss had proposed to cut 20 percent of the Central Intelligence Agency’s staff. Kerry’s dollar cut didn’t have to come from the personnel side of the ledger, so Goss’s Republican proposal would have cut more deeply into the human resources of the CIA than Kerry’s. But the Bush deception worked. The public went to the polls with a mental picture of Kerry as much weaker on intelligence spending than his actual record reflected. The Bush team hadn’t lied, exactly. But they gave millions of voters a false picture of Kerry’s actual record on intelligence spending.
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Partisan Falsehoods Most Americans Believed
FALSEHOOD: John Kerry voted for cuts in intelligence after September 11, 2001.
Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 55 percent
FALSEHOOD: The Bush administration permitted members of the bin Laden family to fly out of the United States while U.S. airspace was still closed after September 11, 2001.
Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 52 percent
Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. Postelection telephone poll of adults, Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample size: 1,731 for both questions. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/–2.4 percentage points.
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Bin Laden Baloney
Implied deception worked against Bush, too. Michael Moore’s highly partisan movie Fahrenheit 9/11 left many viewers, including the authors of this book, with the impression that President Bush had approved a special flight to allow relatives of Osama bin Laden who lived in the United States to get out of the
country while U.S. airspace was still closed in the days immediately following 9/11. The movie also strongly implied that the bin Laden clan escaped without being questioned by U.S. officials about where Osama himself might be found, or about any prior knowledge of the attack. A close reading of Moore’s script shows that Moore never stated that as a fact, but his implied message was unmistakable. Over newsreel footage of passengers stranded by the 9/11 grounding of all commercial flights, Moore is heard saying, “Who wanted to fly? No one. Except the bin Ladens.” That is followed by footage of an airplane taking off, accompanied by the booming strains of The Animals’ rock song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Then Moore says, “It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens.” But as the final report of the independent 9/11 Commission later documented—possibly to clarify the widely held misimpression Moore had created—the flight carrying the bin Laden relatives didn’t depart until a full week after airspace was reopened to commercial flights. Furthermore, the FBI questioned a number of the family members before they were allowed to leave.
Late in the campaign, Moore’s sly insinuation was exceeded in mendacity by the Media Fund, an independent, Democratic-leaning group headed by former Bill Clinton deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes. It spent nearly $60 million in an attempt to defeat Bush. Part of that sum went to a radio ad saying that the bin Laden family had been allowed to fly “when most other air traffic was grounded.” In fact, the bin Laden flight was on September 20, and the Federal Aviation Administration had allowed commercial air traffic to resume at eleven A.M. on September 13.
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