unSpun

by Brooks Jackson

  The radio ad also said, “We don’t know whether Osama’s family members would have told us where bin Laden was hiding. But thanks to the Bush White House, we’ll never find out.” That was utterly false. The FBI had questioned the family members—almost two dozen of them. Here’s some of what the 9/11 Commission’s final report said on that point:

  Twenty-two of the 26 people on the Bin Ladin flight were interviewed by the FBI. Many were asked detailed questions. None of the passengers stated that they had any recent contact with Usama Bin Ladin or knew anything about terrorist activity [pp. 557–58].

  * * *

  False Radio Ad

  MEDIA FUND: “Flight Home”

  Announcer: After nearly 3,000 Americans were killed, while our nation was mourning the dead and the wounded, the Saudi royal family was making a special request of the Bush White House. As a result, nearly two dozen of Osama bin Laden’s family members were rounded up—not to be arrested or detained, but to be taken to an airport, where a chartered jet was waiting…to return them to their country. They could have helped us find Osama bin Laden. Instead the Bush White House had Osama's family flown home, on a private jet, in the dead of night, when most other air traffic was grounded.

  We don't know whether Osama's family members would have told us where bin Laden was hiding. But thanks to the Bush White House, we'll never find out.

  * * *

  Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission said that the bin Laden family members might not have been interviewed had they simply departed the country in the usual way, rather than leaving on a charter flight with special White House clearance:

  Having an opportunity to check the Saudis was useful to the FBI. This was because the U.S. government did not, and does not, routinely run checks on foreigners who are leaving the United States. This procedure [chartering a flight] was convenient to the FBI, as the Saudis who wished to leave in this way would gather and present themselves for record checks and interviews, an opportunity that would not be available if they simply left on regularly scheduled commercial flights [p. 557].

  Fifty-two percent of the people we polled found it truthful that the Bush administration let the bin Laden family leave the United States while airspace was still closed. In this case it was mostly Democrats who were deceived (perhaps because they wanted to be; more on that later): 70 percent of them found the false statement truthful. But nearly half the independents were taken in, too: 48 percent found it truthful. And more than one third of Republicans—36 percent—also bought the myth that Bush let the bin Laden clan skedaddle when airports were still closed.

  Nonstop Deception

  Political deception doesn’t stop when elections are over. Even in nonelection years, interest groups now weigh in on legislative and other policy debates with TV ad campaigns on which they spend tens of millions of dollars. In 2005:

  • In a radio ad by a conservative group called Freedom-Works, former Republican House leader Dick Armey misleadingly claimed a proposed reform of asbestos litigation set aside “billions of…tax dollars as payoffs to trial lawyers.” In fact, trial lawyers had opposed the measure; it would have cut into their legal fees.

  • A liberal group called Campaign for America’s Future ran a grossly misleading newspaper ad claiming that Wall Street stockbrokers stood to get a $279 billion windfall from the individual Social Security accounts that Bush outlined in some detail in 2005. FactCheck.org dug up evidence that brokers could expect less than two pennies—yes, pennies—for every $1,000 invested.

  • A conservative group called Let Freedom Ring, Inc., ran a pair of TV ads pushing for a $4 billion security fence along the Mexican border. The ad showed footage of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center with a voice-over claiming “illegal immigration from Mexico provides easy cover for terrorists.” But none of the 9/11 hijackers entered the United States through Mexico, and all entered legally. More persons from suspect Muslim nations actually slip in over the Canadian border than from Mexico.

  No Respect

  As we hope is becoming clear, respect for facts isn’t a major concern in the advertising industry, and is far too rare in politics.

  “Surely it is asking too much to expect the advertiser to describe the shortcomings of his product,” wrote David Ogilvy in his Confessions of an Advertising Man. The legendary adman said he was “continuously guilty of suppressio veri.” That translates from the Latin as “suppression of truth,” and it sums up a lot of what we see in commercial advertising. The art of advertising, in fact, has been described as the art of promoting a false illusion. “I’ve never worked on a product that was better than another. They hardly don’t exist,” the advertising executive George Lois told CBS News’s 60 Minutes in 1981. “So what I have to do is, I have to create an imagery about that product.”

  The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin gives a good example of the attitude we are talking about in her 1991 book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She reports that LBJ sometimes claimed that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Alamo, and at other times said he died at the Battle of San Jacinto, in which Sam Houston routed the Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna and won independence for Texas. The latter claim was particularly unlikely, since Houston lost only nine men killed in the twenty-minute battle. And, obviously, both claims could not be true. In fact, Goodwin learned that the great-great-grandfather to whom Johnson referred actually “died at home, in bed.” When she challenged LBJ he said, “God damn it, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for details?”

  Goodwin explains that Johnson was engaging in the old Texas tradition of the “tall tale.” She quotes a literary historian, Marcus Cunliffe, who wrote that as the “tall tale” spread west it entered political oratory during an era when politics was among the few sources of entertainment: “Was it true? The question had little meaning. What mattered was the story itself.”

  The same notion surfaced again in 2006 when the author James Frey was exposed as having fabricated portions of his supposedly truthful memoir A Million Little Pieces. Oprah Winfrey, who had promoted the best-selling book to her devoted audience, at first defended the “underlying message of redemption” in the book, implying that it was acceptable to lie about the small stuff in the service of a laudable goal. But two weeks later she publicly apologized on her own show. “I left the impression that the truth does not matter,” she said. “And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe.”

  That’s not what we believe either, and we’d like to see fewer tall tales and more respect for factual accuracy in politics, advertising, and public life in general. Count us among the “sticklers” who so irritated LBJ. The attitude we’d prefer was shown by the future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in 1986, when he was a young aide to President Ronald Reagan. Somebody had drafted a joke for Reagan to drop into his annual economic message: “I just turned 75 today, [but that’s] only 30 degrees Celsius.” That was incorrect: 75 degrees Fahrenheit is only 23.9 degrees on the Celsius scale. Reporters for The New York Times, poring over Roberts White House memos during Roberts’s confirmation battle in 2005, found that he had corrected the president’s prepared remarks. When Reagan actually delivered them, he said: “I heard a reference to my age this morning. I’ve heard a lot of them recently. I did turn 75 today, but remember, that’s only 24 Celsius.”

  Unprotected Public

  How do the deceivers get away with it? Truth-in-advertising laws give some protection from false claims in commercial advertising, but a lot still get through. A false ad can run for many months before regulators get it off the air. And even then, advertisers have learned to weasel-word their commercials so that their claims are literally accurate but still misleading. We’ll have more to say about that later in this book. As for politicians, they actually have a legal right to lie in their television and radio ads. There is no federal law requiring truth in political ads at all, and the few states that have attempted such laws have had
them overturned or found them ineffective.

  Some believe that politicians can be sued for defamation if they stray too far from the truth, and they think that provides some protection to voters. It doesn’t. The courts move too slowly for that, and they rightly give candidates the full benefit of the free-speech protections of the U.S. Constitution. So lawsuits for false political claims are rare, and do voters no good. In a classic case from the past, during the 1964 presidential election Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate, sued FACT magazine for claiming he had a severely paranoid personality and was psychologically unfit for the high office. Goldwater won the lawsuit, but the verdict came down long after he had lost the election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. So for any who voted against Goldwater because they believed the magazine, the courts were no help. The attitude of the courts is that voters are grown-ups who deserve to hear all sides of an argument, even the falsehoods, and that it’s up to them to sort it out for themselves.

  Citizens might expect to find political spin aggressively debunked by the news media, but in our view they get far too little of that. There was a brief flurry of “factcheck”-style reports in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, but that was a departure from the norm. The fact that some news organizations were actually calling dubious claims “false” or “misleading” was itself considered newsworthy. The PBS NewsHour devoted a segment to the phenomenon on its evening newscast. Alas, the media fact-checking quickly faded once the election was over. The hard reality is that the public is exposed to enormous amounts of deception that go unchallenged by government regulators, the courts, or the news media. We voters and consumers must pretty much fend for ourselves if we know what’s good for us. In coming chapters, we’ll show you how.

  Chapter 2

  A Bridesmaid’s Bad Breath

  Warning Signs of Trickery

  POOR EDNA. SHE WAS ONE GREAT-LOOKING WOMAN, SO IT WAS strange that she couldn’t land a husband. And nobody would tell her why she was “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.” Edna wasn’t real, but her story, part of the ad campaign begun in 1923 that made Listerine lucrative, offers a window into how we can be manipulated by appeals to our fears and insecurities.

  The reason Edna was headed for spinsterhood—according to the ads—was breath so offensive that “even your best friends won’t tell you.” The ploy worked: Lambert sold tanker loads of Listerine. In 1999, Advertising Age magazine named the “bridesmaid” ad one of the hundred top campaigns of the twentieth century.

  The Listerine ads appealed to fear with a simple, unspoken message: use our product, or risk losing friends or even a future spouse because of putrid breath that you may not even know you have. Other Listerine ads played variations on the theme. In an ad from 1930, a dentist wonders why his patients have deserted him; he had never heard the whispers about his awful breath. The headline: “Do they say it of you?—probably.” Another ad, from 1946, shows a young man rejected at a job interview and asks, “In these days of fierce competition to get and hold a job, can you afford to take chances because of halitosis (unpleasant breath)?”

  WARNING SIGN: If It’s Scary, Be Wary

  FEAR HAS BEEN A STAPLE TACTIC OF ADVERTISERS AND POLITICIANS for so long that you’d think that we would have become better at detecting their use of it. But fear and insecurity can still cloud our judgment. To put the lesson in a nutshell: “If it’s scary, be wary.”

  The FUD Factor

  Fear sells things other than mouthwash. In the 1970s, one of IBM’s most talented computer designers left to make and market a new machine. Gene Amdahl’s “Amdahl 470” mainframe computer was a direct replacement for IBM’s System 370, then the market leader, but sales were less than expected. Amdahl found that many corporate customers were afraid to buy his product even though by all accounts it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the IBM machine. He accused his former employer of using “FUD”—his acronym, meaning “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”—to discourage consumers from his new brand. Would Amdahl’s company be around to support their hot new product? Would IBM retaliate somehow? Would corporate purchasers be fired for taking a risk if things went bad?

  We see FUD being employed to sell all sorts of things. There are few Internet users who haven’t run into frightening pop-up messages along the lines of this hit from 2004–05: “WARNING: POSSIBLE SPYWARE DETECTED…Spyware can steal information from your computer, SPAM your e-mail account or even CRASH YOUR COMPUTER!” Frightened recipients who clicked a link to “complete the scan” were taken to a website peddling a $39.95 product called SpyKiller, which promised to remove “all traces” of the fearsome spyware. But the Federal Trade Commission found this FUD-based pitch to be a lie. No scan had been performed before the message was sent, no spyware had been found, and the program didn’t even work as advertised—it failed to remove “significant amounts” of spyware. In May 2005, the FTC took the Houston-based marketer, Trustsoft, Inc., to court, and the company and its chief executive, Danilo Ladendorf, later agreed to pay $1.9 million to settle the case. Ladendorf was to sell his Houston residence to pay back what the FTC called “ill-gotten gains,” but by then tens of thousands of consumers had been tricked.

  Bush’s “Day of Horror”

  The buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq showed a particularly able use of FUD. In his State of the Union address of January 28, 2003, President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and invited listeners to imagine what would have happened if Saddam had given any to the 9/11 hijackers: “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” The previous September, Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser, had said on CNN that it wasn’t clear how quickly Saddam could obtain a nuclear weapon, then added: “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” With memories of September 11, 2001, still fresh, those appeals to fear helped generate overwhelming public support for the war. On March 17, 2003, three days before the war began, only 27 percent of those polled for The Washington Post said they opposed the war. A lopsided majority of 71 percent said they supported it, including 54 percent who said they supported it “strongly.”

  Afterward, as we all know now, U.S. inspectors searched for months only to conclude that Saddam had actually destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons years earlier. He had no active program to develop nuclear weapons. Bush’s “day of horror” speech was as scary as scary gets. And many of us—the president, the CIA, Congress, and much of the press and the public—should have been more wary, should have asked more questions, and should have demanded more evidence.

  Some circumstances justify raising an alarm: it’s appropriate to shout “Fire!” when flames really put lives or property in immediate danger. Our point here is that a raw appeal to fear is often used to cover a lack of evidence that a real threat exists, and should alert us to take a hard look at the facts. Are we being warned, or deceived?

  WARNING SIGN: A Story That’s “Too Good”

  WE SHOULD APPROACH CLAIMS CAUTIOUSLY WHEN THEY ARE TOO dramatic, especially when we want them to be true. Consider a case involving what we might call “destruction of mass weapons.”

  The book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was greeted with celebration by advocates of gun control. The author, Michael A. Bellesiles, a professor of history at Atlanta’s Emory University, claimed that household gun ownership had been rare in colonial and pre–Civil War America. Michael Barnes, the then president of Handgun Control, Inc. (now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence), lauded Bellesiles’s “discovery” and proclaimed: “By exposing the truth about gun ownership in early America, Michael Bellesiles has removed one more weapon in the gun lobby’s arsenal of fallacies against common-sense gun laws.”

  If, indeed, weapons ownership wasn’t widespread in colonial America, then the picture of a nation of “Minutemen” with mus
kets over the fireplace was false. This also meant the National Rifle Association would have less room to argue that the Second Amendment was written to guarantee the right of individuals to own guns privately, and not just to bear arms as members of a regulated militia. Bellesiles offered as proof what he described as a painstaking, ten-year study of 11,000 probate records showing what people owned when they died. Columbia University seemingly endorsed the finding, awarding Bellesiles’s book the coveted Bancroft Prize in 2001.

  For those favoring gun control, Bellesiles told a story that was way too good to be true—literally. “The data fit together almost too neatly,” noted Professor James Lindgren of the Northwestern University School of Law. After checking a portion of the same records on which Bellesiles said he had based his conclusions, Lindgren and his colleagues concluded that he had “repeatedly counted women as men, counted guns in about a hundred wills that never existed, and claimed that the inventories evaluated more than half of the guns as old or broken when fewer than 10% were so listed.” In eight different sets of probate records, guns appeared in 50 percent to 73 percent of estates left by men, figures several times higher than Bellesiles had claimed. Lindgren found guns were twice as common as Bibles in estates from 1774.

  Other discrepancies were noted; for example, Bellesiles claimed to have examined probate records from San Francisco, but all such records had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Emory University placed Bellesiles on paid leave and asked a panel of outside historians to investigate. The investigators found “evidence of falsification” regarding the “vital” table summarizing Bellesiles’s probate data and said “his scholarly integrity is seriously in question.” He resigned from Emory, still protesting that he was guilty of nothing worse than innocent mistakes. Nevertheless, in December 2002 Columbia University withdrew the Bancroft Prize, saying that Bellesiles had “violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct.”