unSpun (6 page)

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

S
OMETIMES 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

W
HEN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES WENT TO WAR AGAINST
I
RAQ 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.

Chapter 4

UFO Cults and Us

Why We Get Spun

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

—L
EON
F
ESTINGER
, et al.,
When Prophecy Fails
(1956)

H
AVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY OTHER PEOPLE ARE SO UNREASONABLE
and hard to convince? Why is it that they disregard hard facts that prove you're right and they're wrong? The fact is, we humans aren't wired to think very rationally. That's been confirmed recently by brain scans, but our irrational reaction to hard evidence has been the subject of scholarly study for some time. Consider one of the most famous scientific observations in all of psychology, the story of a UFO cult that was infiltrated by the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues half a century ago.

They observed a small group of true believers whose leader was a woman the authors called Marian Keech, in a place they called Lake City. Mrs. Keech said she had received messages from beings called Guardians on Planet Clarion saying that North America would be destroyed by a flood, but that her followers would be taken to safety on a UFO a few hours earlier, at midnight on December 21, 1954. Members of her cult quit jobs, sold possessions, dropped out of school, and prepared for the space journey by removing metal objects from their clothing as instructed by Mrs. Keech. They gathered in her living room on the appointed night, and waited.

Midnight came and went, and of course neither the flood nor the promised spacecraft arrived. But did the faithful look at this incontrovertible evidence and conclude, “Oh, well, we were wrong?” Not a chance. At 4:45
A.M
., as morning approached, Mrs. Keech told them that she had received another message: the cataclysm had been called off because of the believers' devotion. “Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth,” she said, “has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.” And then she told the group to go spread the word of this miracle. One member walked out, fed up with Keech's failed predictions, but the others were jubilant. In the days that followed, Festinger and his colleagues reported, cult members who previously had shown no interest in proselytizing now put their energies into gaining converts. They became even more committed to their cause after seeing what any reasonable person would conclude was shattering proof that they had been completely wrong.

Why should this be? The reason, Festinger tells us, is that it is psychologically painful to be confronted with information that contradicts what we believe. For Mrs. Keech's followers to concede error would have meant admitting they had been colossal fools. But convincing others of their beliefs would not only avoid any such embarrassment, it would provide some false comfort, as though more believers would constitute more proof.

The Keech cult is an extreme case, but the discomfort at being confronted with evidence of error is a universal human emotion. It's just no fun to admit we've been wrong. So we strive to avoid that unpleasant feeling of psychological conflict—what Festinger calls cognitive dissonance—that occurs when deeply held beliefs are challenged by conflicting evidence. Keech's followers could have reduced their dissonance by abandoning their religious beliefs, but instead some of them adopted an explanation of the new evidence that was compatible with what they already believed. Cognitive dissonance is a fancy term for something all of us feel from time to time. Decades of social science experiments have shown that, in a sense, there's a little UFO cultist in everybody.