Chapter One
• Spin pervades both commerce and politics. Any number of products with household names are marketed with false or deceptive advertising. Whole companies have been built on such deceptions. Elections have been decided by voters who believed false ideas fed to them by manipulative television ads and expressed in “talking points”.
• Deceptive product promotion is a minor problem compared with political spin.
• In extreme cases, commercial deception can cost lives.
• Politicians deliver even bigger doses of prescription-strength deception, deliberately filling voters’ heads with disinformation about their opponents and about their own policies.
• Political deceivers don’t always state their falsehoods outright; sometimes they merely imply them. But the effect can be just as bad.
• Political deception doesn’t stop when elections are over. Even in nonelection years, interest groups now weigh in on legislative and other policy debates with TV ad campaigns on which they spend tens of millions of dollars.
• Respect for facts isn’t a major concern in the advertising industry, and is far too rare in politics.
• Truth- in –advertising laws give some protection from false claims in commercial advertising, but a lot still get through. Advertisers have learned to weasel-word their commercials so that their claims are literally accurate but still misleading. As for politicians they have a legal right to lie in their television and radio ads. There is no federal law requiring truth in political ads at all, and the few states that have attempted such laws have had them overturned or found them ineffective.
Chapter Two
• Fear has been a staple tactic of advertisers and politicians for so long that you’d think that we would have become better at detecting their use of it. But fear and insecurity can still cloud our judgment.
• We should approach claims cautiously when they are too dramatic, especially when we want them to be true.
• Extravagant claims are just too easy to accept when they match biases.
• The Dangling Comparative – “Larger,” “Better,” “Faster,” “Better-Tasting.” Advertisers frequently employ such terms in an effort to make their product stand out from the crowd. Politicians are particularly able users of this technique. A dangling comparative occurs when any term meant to compare two things-a word such as “higher,” “better,” “faster,” “more”-is left dangling without stating what’s being compared.
• Just as comparative words such as “More” and “Higher” are warning signs, so are superlatives such as “most” and “highest” and claims such as “biggest in history” or “smallest ever.” Superlative claims can lead us to choose needlessly expensive products and make shallow political decisions.
• “The Blame Game” – Blaming often occurs reflexively, out of pure partisanship and with little regard for facts.
• “Glittering Generalities” – Beware of attractive sounding but vague terms. Some other nice-sounding but vague terms to watch out for: dignity, honor, freedom, integrity, and justice (including both the economic” and “social” varieties). It’s always good to ask, “What do you mean by that exactly?”