unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [5]
Deception Can Be Bad for Your Health
Deception is practically built into the business plans of some major corporations, and entire brands have been built on false advertising. Consider the long and checkered history of Listerine, for example. In 1923 the Lambert Pharmacal Company started marketing what had been a relatively ineffective hospital antiseptic as a mouthwash that could cure “halitosis,” a medical term not much used until Lambert’s ads made it a household word. Sales of Listerine exploded, going from $100,000 a year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927 and $7 million in 1930. But the ads were false: no mouthwash can cure bad breath. Bad breath has a variety of causes, including certain foods, smoking, gum disease, dry mouth, diabetes, and even dieting, which can’t be offset by any mouthwash. As the American Dental Association now emphasizes in bold print on its website: “Mouthwashes are generally cosmetic and do not have a long-lasting effect on bad breath.”
Other Listerine ads in the 1930s and 1940s claimed that the same product could cure “infectious dandruff” when rubbed on the scalp, a preposterous claim given that dandruff isn’t caused by infection. For decades Listerine also claimed to cure sore throats and to reduce the likelihood of catching colds. As far back as 1931, The Journal of the American Medical Association railed against such false claims, saying “by its very name Listerine debases the fame of the great scientific investigator [Joseph Lister] who first established the idea of antisepsis.” And yet Listerine kept right on making its claims, decade after decade, stopping in 1977 only after it lost a five-year legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark case, the court upheld the commission’s order to run a year’s worth of corrective advertising, at a cost of $10.2 million, telling audiences that “Listerine will not prevent colds or sore throats or lessen their severity.”
And still the spin continues. Listerine ads still imply the product cures offensive breath odor by saying it “kills the germs that cause bad breath.” That’s true but misleading. The germs come right back, as they always have. Lately, research has finally turned up a legitimate use for Listerine: it does slow the formation of dental plaque. But old habits die hard: Listerine (now owned by Pfizer) overstated its one virtue in a 2004 TV ad that claimed “Listerine’s as effective as floss at fighting plaque and gingivitis. Clinical studies prove it.” But the clinical studies proved no such thing, because they failed to ensure that the subjects using floss were using it correctly. A leading maker of dental floss sued Pfizer, and Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court of Manhattan ruled that Pfizer’s studies “proved only that Listerine is ‘as effective as improperly-used floss.’” On January 6, 2005, he ordered the ads off the air. Chin also said the ads might be causing real physical harm: “I find that Pfizer’s false and misleading advertising also poses a public health risk, as the advertisements present a danger of undermining the efforts of dental professionals…to convince consumers to floss on a daily basis.” We’ll have more to say about Listerine later, showing you how its advertising displayed classic warning signs of deception.
In extreme cases, commercial deception can cost lives. In May 2004, the FTC sued a Canadian outfit called Seville Marketing, Ltd., accusing it of deceptively advertising something called Discreet, supposedly a home test for HIV. Seville claimed its product was 99.4 percent accurate, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 59.3 percent of tested kits provided inaccurate results. These included both false HIV-positive results