unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [6]
It wasn’t until a year later, May 18, 2005, that Seville agreed to settle the case, with a court order prohibiting the company from selling its test kits or making deceptive claims. Seville also agreed to let the FTC tell its customers that the product didn’t work as advertised and that they should contact a health professional. The FTC offered no estimate of how many HIV-infected persons might have been lulled into a false sense of security by an erroneous negative reading. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that many people delayed treatment or unknowingly spread the virus to others because they were deceived by Seville’s advertising.
Prescription-Strength Political Bunk
Politicians deliver even bigger doses of prescription-strength deception, deliberately filling voters’ heads with disinformation about their opponents and about their own policies. One example is what we at FactCheck.org called a tax fable when it first surfaced in the 2004 campaign. The Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, claimed in a speech on December 3, 2003, that under Bush’s tax-cut bills “80 percent of the tax relief for upper-income filers goes to small businesses.” It turned out that Gillespie’s definition of “small” businesses actually included all partnerships, a category that includes the nation’s biggest accounting firms, law firms, and real-estate partnerships, and “businesses” that are really only sidelines, such as occasional rental income from a corporate chief’s ski condo. Gillespie was trying to support the argument that cutting federal income taxes for high-income individuals translates at least in part to a tax cut for small businesses, stimulating hiring and thus helping some lower-income workers, too. But Gillespie was counting every rich person who got even a dollar in income from a small business as a “small-business owner”—and counting every dollar of tax benefit they received as relief for small business. Under that preposterous definition President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both qualified as “small businesses,” by virtue of $84 Bush received from an oil-drilling partnership, and the consulting income of Cheney’s wife, Lynne. Neither “business” was a notable job producer.
The Bush campaign would use the same twisted reasoning in a TV ad against John Kerry, claiming that Kerry’s proposal to scale back Bush’s tax cuts for those making $200,000 a year or more would mean “900,000 small business owners would pay higher tax rates than most multinational corporations.” In fact, according to analysis by the Tax Policy Center (a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution) the maximum number of small-business owners who could be affected—even by $1—was barely more than half the number the Bush ad claimed.
Voters Deceived
Not all voters are taken in by political snake oil, but many are. How many may surprise you. Bush’s claim that Kerry’s tax increase would have hit 900,000 small-business owners, for example, was found either “somewhat truthful” or “very truthful” by 62 percent of Americans polled after the 2004 election by the National Annenberg Election Survey. Only 24 percent found the statement “not too truthful” or “not truthful at all,” and the rest didn’t know or didn’t answer. That means that of those who had an opinion, two and a half times as many had the wrong idea as had the right one.
The deception took in members of both parties, though of course not equally. Unsurprisingly, Republicans were more inclined to believe the Republican president’s deception than were Democrats. Among Republicans, 76 percent found the claim truthful. But 64 percent of independents also found it truthful, and—what is surprising—nearly half of all Democrats did too. Forty-nine percent of them were inclined to believe Bush’s unfounded claim that their own candidate would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses.
* * *
Dubious Campaign Claims Most Americans