unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [22]
TRICK #4: Eye Candy
IF YOU JUST LISTENED TO THE ANNOUNCER, A TV AD FOR THE ANTIDEPRESSANT prescription drug Paxil CR was quite direct about some of the unpleasant consequences that might result from taking it: “Side effects may include nausea, sweating, sexual side effects, weakness, insomnia, or sleepiness.” But if you just looked at the pictures on screen, you got a totally different impression. An attractive young woman was shown walking her dog in a park, chatting with friends, smiling, obviously depression free. She wasn’t sweating or sick to her stomach. She was strong, not weak. Her eyelids weren’t drooping, nor was she complaining of a sleepless night. The announcer continued: “Don’t stop taking Paxil CR before talking to your doctor, since side effects may result from stopping the medicine.” The announcer was in effect saying that this drug can even cause withdrawal symptoms for those who quit “cold turkey,” but what viewers were seeing on screen were some laughing construction workers happily taking a coffee break from the job. Viewers weren’t seeing any of the undesirable possible side effects they were being told about, and as a result, many of them probably weren’t actually hearing the words or taking them into account.
Propagandists know that when words say one thing and pictures say another, it’s the pictures that count. Scholars tell us that redundancy is correlated with retention. To minimize retention, a propagandist says one thing while showing the opposite. When the two differ, what we see tends to override what we hear.
Drug companies have become particularly adept at showing us smiling faces and flowery pictures while the narrator recites material they hope we won’t notice, such as those lists of unpleasant and even debilitating or dangerous possible side effects. In this case, the FDA thought that GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Paxil CR, had gone too far. On June 9, 2004, the FDA ordered the ad off the air as “false or misleading,” partly because it “fails clearly to communicate the major risks associated with Paxil CR.” The FDA denounced the use of pictures and sound to overwhelm the announcer’s words. “The compelling and attention-grabbing visuals and other competing modalities, such as background music…make it difficult for consumers adequately to process and comprehend the risk information,” the FDA said.
The CBS reporter Lesley Stahl learned about this same effect the hard way. According to Stahl, she was worried that a report in which she criticized Ronald Reagan during his 1984 reelection campaign was so tough that her White House sources might “freeze me out.” No worries: a Reagan aide, Richard Darman, called her afterward to say “What a great piece. We loved it.” As Stahl wrote in her book Reporting Live, the exchange continued:
STAHL: “Why are you so happy? Didn’t you hear what I said?”
DARMAN: “Nobody heard what you said.”
STAHL: “Come again?”
DARMAN: “You guys in Televisionland haven’t figured it out, have you? When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. Lesley, I mean it, nobody heard you.”
Her TV story had shown generally upbeat pictures of Reagan, and according to Darman those pictures were all that viewers carried away from her critical report. Darman had explained the basic principle of the “eye candy” effect: pictures tend to overpower spoken words. It’s just the way we human beings are wired.
Research by Kathleen Jamieson documented the eye candy effect in 1988 and 1989. During the presidential election campaign of 1988, groups of voters were asked what they remembered seeing in news in the past week. In one week, ABC News correspondent Richard Threlkeld had debunked distortions in both an ad by