Teresa Troyer
Un-spun Chapters 3 & 4
In the book Un-Spun: Fining Facts in a World of [Disinformaiton], the authors Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson the “Tricks of the Deception Trade”.
• Tall coffee isn’t tall in relation to anything else on the menu.
• Large olives are really medium-sized.
• Montana based Evergreen Foundation is supported by companies that cut down trees.
• Politician says “cut” – almost never mans that spending will actually go down.
Deceptive tricks so common we can shrug them off. Others deceive us when we let our guard down. We need to recognize the common tricks of the deception trade.
Trick #1: Misnomers – laws or statements that say something but isn’t really what it says. Gives a misleading impression.
• “Assault Weapon Ban” by President Clinton in 1994 (44) didn’t really ban assault weapons – at least, not the one you see pictures so often in the hands of soldiers and terrorists. Fully automatic weapons of all kinds were outlawed around the time of George ”Machine Gun Kelly” and Bonnie and Clyde. It has been illegal in the United States town a real machine und since 1934.
• The simple term “large” becomes misleading in the hands of the California Olive Industry. “California Ripe Olives grow in a variety of sizes: small, medium, large, extra large, jumbo, colossal and super colossal,” (45)
• Some names really can deceive, however, unless we keep our guard up. The makers of Smoke Away, had no reasonable basis for the product’s claim that it would help people stop smoking in a week or less.
• The FTC called the claims ”false and outrageous” for products like Lung Support Formula, Antibetic Pancreas Tonic, and Testerex. In all those cases, the product manes were mentioned as one factor contributing to the deception. (46)
Trick #2: Frame It and Claim it - where companies or politicians frame an issue with a catch phrase that the public will remember and will get them to react to the statement in the manner desired.
• “Death Tax” – The term “death tax” was an intentional misnomer: obviously what’s being taxed isn’t death, but bequeathed wealth. (46)
• “Frame the issue, claim the issue” (47) Supporters of the estate tax later regretted they dah been so slow to frame the issue their way, as the “Paris Hilton tax cut”.
• President Bush’s Social Security plan was framed by the AFL-CIO, “Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security”. (47)
• George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkley, has argued in a best-selling book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, that conservatives have been far better than liberals at framing issues in this way. (48)
For the ordinary citizen or voter, the important thing is to recognize that both sides try to use words that we’ll automatically accept or reject without thinking too much. Indeed, sometimes just choosing a word means choosing sides. (49)
Trick #3: Weasel Words – Weasel words such the meaning out of a phrase or sentence, the way that weasels supposedly suck the contents out of an egg, leaving only a hollow shell. (49)
• “Up to 50% off” the empty shell is “50% off”, the weasel words are “Up to”.
• Publishers Clearing House’s , “You May Already Be a Winner!” the weasel word “May”.
• Hawaiian Punch’s “Fruit Juicy Red” , the weasel word is “Juicy” meaning something less than “juice”
• Words like “Largely” conceal a writer’s ignorance of the true number. (50)
o Largely – could mean anything up to half
o Most – means more than half
o Several – can mean any number higher than two or three, buy less than “many”
A hollow shell that should alert us to the possibility that the writer is a bit hazy about the facts. (50)
Trick #4: Eye Candy – This is where you are given visual information that may over ride that verbal message that you are getting.
• Ads for the antidepressant Paxil CR was verbally quite direst about some of the unpleasant consequences that might result from taking it, while you were shown pictures of an attractive young woman walking her dog, chatting with friends, smiling, obviously depression free.
• Propagandists know that when words say one thing and pictures say another, it’s the pictures that count. (51)
• CBS reporter Lesley Stahl learned about Eye Candy the hard way. (52) She did a report that criticized Ronald Reagan during his 1984 reelection that was so tough that her White House sourced might “freeze me out”. During her report the TV shown generally upbeat pictures of Reagan and according to Darman those pictures were ll that viewers carried away from her critical report.
• President Bush’s appearance in November 30, 2005, at the U.S. Naval Academy. His message of the day- that he had a “plan for victory” in Iraq – was reinforce with banners above and below the podium that read “plan for victory”.
When you see dramatic images, listen to the “fine print”. Ask yourself, “What are my ears telling me about this picture?” (55)
Trick #5: The “Average” Bear - This is a common mathematical trick. Average does not always mean “typical”. (55)
When you hear “average,” always ask, “Does that really man ‘typical’?” A single number seldom tells the whole story, especially with something as big and complicated as the U.S. economy or the federal tax system. (56)
Trick #6: The Baseline Bluff – The statement may say that there is a cut planned but actually there is an increase but it’s not as big as the other side’s plan.
Why is it that some people disregard hard facts that prove you’re right and they’re wrong? The fact is, we humans aren’t wired to think very rationally. (65)
One of the most famous scientific observations in all of psychology, the story of a UFO cult that was infiltrated by the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues half a century ago. They observed a small group of true believers whose leader was a woman who said that she had received messages from beings called Guardians on Planet Clarion. When the beings didn’t show up the woman told the believers to go out and spread the word of this miracle.
Festinger tells us, the reason is that is is psychologically painful to be confronted with information that contradicts what we believe. It’s just no fun to admit we’ve been wrong. So we strive to avoid that unpleasant feeling of psychology conflict, cognitive dissonance-that occurs when deeply held beliefs are challenged by conflicting evidence. (66,67)
Extreme political partisans sometime display such irrational thinking that they have come to be dismissed as “barking moonbats”. A barking moonbat is “someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency, according to the London blogger Adriana Cronin-Lukas of Samizdata.net , who helped popularizes the colorful phrase. (69)
Humans are not by nature the fact-driven, rational beings we like to think we are. We get the facts wrong more often than we think we do. And we do so in predictable ways,: we engage in wishful thinking. We embrace information that supports our beliefs and rejects evidence that challenges them our minds tend to take shortcuts, which require some effort to avoid. The human mind operated in ways that defy logic. (69)
Humans tend to seek out even weak evidence to support their existing beliefs, and to ignore evidence that undercuts those beliefs. In the process, we apply stringent tests to evidence we don’t want to hear, While letting slide uncritically into our minds any information that suits our needs.

I still have some work to do on this but here it is for now.