unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [10]
• 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