unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [14]
The 150,000 figure was disputed in 1994 by Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of the feminist movement, who said “the correct figure is less than 100.” While Sommers should be credited for debunking Wolf’s wildly inaccurate claim, she, too, was way off, according to Harold Goldstein and Harry Gwirtsman of the Eating Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. They noted that between one half percent and one percent of the 28 million women between 15 and 29 years old were thought to have anorexia, and that a mortality rate of about 10 percent over a 20-year period was “generally accepted.” That would work out to roughly 1,000 deaths per year, Goldstein and Gwirtsman figured. They also cautioned against accepting “data in the service of ideology.” That’s a notion we endorse. When the data square too nicely with your biases, always ask, “Is this dramatic story really true? Am I buying this just because I want it to be true? What’s the evidence?”
WARNING SIGN: The Dangling Comparative
“LARGER,” “BETTER,” “FASTER,” “BETTER-TASTING.” ADVERTISERS FREQUENTLY employ such terms in an effort to make their product stand out from the crowd. In a recent ad, makers of New Ban Intensely Fresh Formula deodorant claimed it “keeps you fresher longer.” One might be forgiven for thinking they meant it keeps you fresher, longer than the competition. But, as a competitor complained to the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division, they meant fresher than Ban’s old formulation.
Politicians are particularly able users of this technique. In the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush’s TV ads hammered away with this line: “[John] Kerry supported higher taxes over 350 times.” A voter might quite reasonably have thought this to mean that Kerry had voted to raise taxes an alarming number of times, but that implication was grossly misleading. Bush did not mean that Kerry had in every case voted to make taxes “higher” than they were at the time. Such votes were relatively rare. Employing a common political tactic, Bush counted every vote Kerry had cast against a proposed tax cut, which meant voting to leave taxes unchanged. He also padded the count by including many procedural votes on the same bills. Bush even counted some of Kerry’s votes for Democratic tax cuts, reasoning that those would still leave taxes higher than the Republican alternatives. Thus, by means of twisted use of the dangling comparative, a vote for cutting taxes became a vote for “higher taxes.”
Bush was using the phrase “higher taxes” without answering the question “Higher than what?” A dangling comparative occurs when any term meant to compare two things—a word such as “higher,” “better,” “faster,” “more”—is left dangling without stating what’s being compared. Bush used a dangling comparative to mischaracterize Kerry’s actual record. Kerry did vote for several tax increases during his twenty years in the Senate, but nothing remotely close to 350. His voting record was consistent with his promise to repeal only part of Bush’s tax cuts and to raise taxes only on persons earning more than $200,000 a year.
Please Mom, More Arsenic!
Just to be fair, we should note that the Democrats have been known to employ the dangling comparative with some skill themselves. In 2001, for example, President Bush was accused of trying to put “more arsenic” in drinking water. In April of that year, the Democratic National Committee ran a TV ad in which a little girl asks, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?” And at the January 4, 2004, debate among Democratic presidential hopefuls in Des Moines, Iowa, Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri said the Bush administration “tried to put more arsenic in the water. We stopped them from doing it.”
But by “more arsenic” Democrats did not mean “more than is in the water now”; the disagreement was over how much to reduce arsenic levels. When Bush took office he suspended a regulation