UnSpun Summery
Chapter 2
Teresa Troyer
June 27, 2008
Chapter 2, “A Bridesmaid’s ad Breath”, Warning signs of Trickery gives a glimpse of how you can start to spot deceptive talk. Here are the highlights.
• Writing ads that play on the fears and emotions of the listeners.
• Listerine ads appealed to fear with a simple, unspoken message: use our product, or risk losing friends or even a future spouse because of putrid breath that you may not even know you have.
• Warning sign: If it’s scary, be wary.
• Use of FUD, “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” Fear sells! One way that FUD has been used was with pop-up messages on your computer with lines from 2004-05: “WARNING POSSIBLE SPYWARE DETECTED... spyware can steal information from your computer, SPAM you e-mail account or even CRAH YOUR COMPUTER!”. People would click the link and be sent to a website that was peddling spyware. Tens of thousands of consumer had been tricked with this one before the FTC shut it down.
• President Bush used this tactic with his “Day of Horror” speech on January 28, 2003. He was talking about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Here he told Americans, “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” With this speech those appeals to fear helped generate overwhelming public support for the war.
• The US inspectors searched for months and founds that Saddam had actually destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons years earlier.
• Warning sign: A story that’s “Too Good”
• Approach claims cautiously when they are too dramatic, especially when we want them to be true.
• Michael A. Bellesiles, professor of history at Atlanta’s Emory University, claimed that household gun ownership had been rare in colonial and pre-Civil War America. He claimed that after a ten year study, he found that weapons ownership wasn’t widespread in colonial America.
• Handgun Control advocates like Michael Barnes (Brady Campaign of Prevent Gun Violence) jumped on this find without truly investigating it.
• Professor James Lindgren of the Northwestern University School of Law, reinvestigated the same estates that Barnes did and found that the figures of gun ownership was actually several times higher the Bellesiles had claimed.
• Extravagant claims are just too easy to accept when they match biases.
• Warning sign: The Dangling Comparative. Larger, Better, Faster.
• Advertisers frequently employ such terms in an effort to make their product stand out from the crowd.
• Politicians use this technique, like in the 2004 presidential campaign, George S. Bush said, “[John] Kerry supported higher taxes over 350 times.” What Bush didn’t tell us was the he counted every vote Kerry had cast against a proposed tax cut, which meant leaving the tax unchanged.
• Using terms like “higher taxes” without answering the question “Higher than what?”
• Warning sign: The Superlatives Swindle - words such as most, highest, biggest in history or smallest ever.
• When superlative words are used ask compared to what?
• The authors Jackson and Jamieson compare the statement, “Has any president been dealt a tougher hand?” and compared that to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and the times that they had to deal with.
• Warning sign: The “Pay You Tuesday” con.
• The Nigerian e-mail scams have been going on since the 1980’s, where a supposedly wealthy of high-placed foreigner sends a message asking for financial help – Today – to move millions of dollars out of his homeland, in return for a percentage of the money to be paid later. The con is obvious yet it still “grosses hundreds of millions of dollars annually and the losses are continuing to escalate.”
• If it sounds like J. Wellington Wimpy, it’s likely to be a trick. “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
• When it’s our politicians that do that to use, we or our children will be the ones to pay the bill later.
• Warning sign: The Blame Game
• President Bush pulled this one when he blamed greedy lawyers as a major factor in the rising cost of health care. What he was doing was pointing a finger at an unpopular group and hoping to divert attention from the weakness of his own evidence.
• Blaming often occurs reflexively, out of pure partisanship and with little regard for facts.
• Warning sign: Glittering Generalities
• Terms used like Coca-Cola’s it’s “the Real Thing”, United Airlines’ “the friendly skies, or Allstates “your in good hands” are used to get you to buy their product without asking to many questions.
• Politicians use glittering generalities when they mouth support for the “middle class”. Who is the “middle class” and who determines that?
• We need to learn to recognize glittering generalities, they are all around us.