unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [1]
Democrats engage in similar behavior. In fact, two weeks after Rove’s speech, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy had added another 75,000 jobs in the previous month and that the unemployment rate had dropped to 4.6 percent. And yet the Democratic National Committee called the results “more evidence of President Bush’s failed economic record,” saying economists had expected a somewhat larger job gain. In fact, the unemployment rate was the lowest in five years, well below the average for all months of the Clinton administration (which was 5.2 percent), and a full percentage point lower than the average for all months since World War II. Thus in the hands of a partisan spinmeister, a better-than-average unemployment rate becomes a failure.
Don’t be tempted to dismiss this sort of thing as a mere difference of interpretation or an argument over whether the economic glass is half full or half empty. There is more to it than that. Both sides are actively working to deceive the public. They may even be deceiving themselves to a large degree, and we often see reason to suspect that’s the case. Both sides tend to ignore evidence that doesn’t favor their point of view and to avoid tough problems by spinning them away and hoping voters won’t notice.
We sometimes see this more easily in the world of advertising, where corporate snake-oil salesmen routinely employ spin to get us to buy their products. In this book we’ll tell you of an over-the-counter pain reliever that claimed to be “prescription strength” when it was half the usual prescription dose, and an Internet service marketed as having “broadband-like speed” when in fact cable modems are several times faster. But as obvious as some advertising deceptions may seem to some of us, they fool any number of people into spending untold hundreds of millions of dollars each year on products that don’t perform as advertised. We’ll tell you about some well-known products whose sales have been built almost entirely on deception. Advertisers keep spinning because it is profitable to do so.
Spin comes at us today in ways that didn’t even exist a decade or so ago. On cable-news talk shows, advocates issue torrents of factual claims daily, seldom challenged by their amiable hosts. And the Internet has enabled a potent new weapon of deception, so-called viral marketing of falsehoods that replicate and spread like a disease. One such message during the 2004 campaign claimed that President Bush secretly planned to reinstitute a military draft if he was reelected. Another claimed that John Kerry’s wife was responsible for sending thousands of U.S. jobs overseas. Both were false, but millions of voters believed them. For example, 42 percent of the people we polled immediately after the 2004 election considered it either “somewhat” or “very” truthful that Bush would reinstitute the draft.
We simply can’t always count on government regulators, courts, or the news media to sort through the daily barrage of baloney. This book is about how to become unspun. We’ll explain how to recognize spin, how to understand its nature, and how to spot the techniques spinners use to deceive. We’ll show you what years of communications research and advances in human psychology have taught us about why even the most intelligent people are susceptible to being spun. We’ll show you how staying unSpun can save your life, not to mention your money and your self-respect.
We’ll also show you how, for all the faults of the Internet, you can use it to find reliable information with a few keystrokes, at home, for free, while avoiding misinformation and fraud. And we’ll offer some methods for properly weighing and evaluating evidence and reaching your own well-founded conclusions.
We’ll share with you the tools that we found useful as we created the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, a political website designed to be a “consumer advocate” for voters. FactCheck.org