unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [12]
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