unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [25]
John Kerry used the same tactic late in his 2004 campaign, running an ad saying “Bush has a plan to cut Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” That was simply false. Bush had stated repeatedly there would be no changes in benefits for anyone already getting them. What Kerry was referring to was a proposal, which Bush eventually embraced, to hold future benefit levels even with the rate of inflation, rather than allowing them to grow more quickly, in line with incomes. Over a very long period of time, that would mean benefit levels perhaps 45 percent lower than they would have been under current benefit formulas (assuming, for the sake of argument, that Congress enacted the tax increases necessary to finance those). But most of the future retirees who might experience that 45 percent “cut” were still unborn at the time Kerry ran the ad.
When you hear a politician talking about a “cut” in a program he or she favors, ask yourself, “A cut compared to what?”
TRICK #7: The Literally True Falsehood
SOMETIMES PEOPLE PICK WORDS THAT ARE DECEPTIVE WITHOUT being strictly, technically false. President Clinton, who had an affair with one of his female interns, didn’t object when his lawyer told a judge that the intern had filed an affidavit saying “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.” Clinton later said that statement was “absolutely” true. How could he endorse the statement that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind,” given the shenanigans that actually went on? In his grand jury testimony of August 17, 1998, Clinton offered this famous explanation:
PRESIDENT CLINTON: It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is…. If “is” means is and never has been that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.
In other words, there had been sex, but not at the moment when the statement was made in court. Clinton went too far: U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright later found Clinton in civil contempt for giving “intentionally false” testimony. (He also denied having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky.) His license to practice law in Arkansas was suspended for five years and he was fined $25,000. He also gave up his right to appear as a lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court rather than face disbarment proceedings there. But even though redefining “is” didn’t work for Clinton, his remark shows us how clever deceivers can try to mislead us without—in their minds, at least—actually lying.
“Reduced fat” may be a literally true claim, but it doesn’t mean “low fat,” just less fat than the product used to have. “Unsurpassed” doesn’t mean “best”; it is just a claim that the product is as good as any other. “Nothing better” might also be stated as “as good but no better.” And the claim that a product is “new and improved” doesn’t signify that it is any good. What advertisers are trying to say is “Give us another try—we think we’ve got it right this time.”
The Stouffer’s Food Corp. made a literally true but misleading claim about its Lean Cuisine frozen entrées in 1991, in a $3 million advertising campaign that said: “Some things we skimp on: Calories. Fat. Sodium…always less than 1 gram of sodium per entrée.” One gram of sodium is quite a lot. Dietary sodium is usually measured in milligrams—thousandths of a gram—and Lean Cuisine entrées contained about 850 milligrams. That’s about a third of the FDA’s recommended total intake for a full day, and too much to be called “low sodium” under public guidelines. The Federal Trade Commission ordered Stouffer’s to stop making the claim. Whether or not it was literally true, the FTC concluded, “the ads were likely, through their words or images, to communicate a false low-sodium claim.”
KFC Corporation used the same sort of “literally true falsehood” in an attempt to palm off fried chicken as health food. One of its ads showed a woman