It’s easy to see how someone can get confused or mis lead when it comes to politics and upcoming election. I think chapter three in the book unSpun, written by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, help clear up the confusion that can sometimes come with political campaigns. They describe some common tricks to watch out for.
Shortly after reading that particular chapter I watched a John McCain ad., that I believe to be very misleading. The McCain ad made some huge and pretty unbelievable promises. John McCain states that we need to “shift our economy towards a new and cleaner power source”. He suggested these cleaner power sources could be obtained through wind, solar power, and bio fuels. He called it “Energy Security”. Doesn’t that sound fantastic. The first thing that ran through my mind was that there would be no more high fuel costs. Then the ad showed a picture of green meadows with huge wind mills. The purpose of these is to generate energy from the wind. This led me to believe that suddenly (if McCain were to win) we would have no more electric bills. I pulled all of these assumptions from a 5 minute clip supporting John McCain.
I related this ad immediately to the “Baseline Bluff”. The baseline bluff is one of the tricks that the authors warn their readers about. Jackson and Jamison gave a good example of the baseline bluff when they refer to politicians and how there always saying “cut”. The authors suggest that when they are talking about cut in a particular program they favor we need to realize that the cut could really only be a small decrease. Doesn’t that sound familiar? To me it sounds like McCain’s “Energy Security”. Although he may have good intentions, I have to question weather or not he will really change our economy towards a new and cleaner power source, or will he just make a few changes in select areas. McCain end his ad for Energy Security by saying “ I know how to do that, and I will do it”. If he nows how to do all of this, why doesn't he tell us how? He doesn't really say anything about how he's going to do it. All he does is show clips of beautiful places and happy people. I think that maybe that was the motivation behind writing the book unspun. I think the authors were hoping that the readers would use their new found knowledge to look past the pretty picture and all the unobtainable promises. Then maybe they would be able to see the truth.
.