unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [11]
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 factchecking 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