The Interplay of Truth and Deception

New Agendas in Theory and Research

Matthew S. McGlone, Mark L. Knapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135844493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

During the past 30 years, there have been a steadily increasing number of scientific and popular publications dealing with lying and deception. Questions about the extent to which public officials are deceptive are standard fare in current magazines and newspapers. This volume aims to present on a more precise conceptualization of this phenomenon, manifested in some well-known constructions like spin, hype, doublespeak, equivocation, and contextomy (quoting out of context).

The contents of the volume have been generated for the New Agendas symposium at the University of Texas College of Communication, and all the authors are young, leading-edge researchers offering innovative perspectives and explorations of lying and deception in various contexts. This volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and advanced/graduate students in communication, media, and psychology. It is written to the level of advanced undergraduates, and it is appropriate for use in courses covering lying and deception.

Chapter 1
Finding the Weasel Word in “Literally True”¹

Brooks Jackson

My topic today is deception. The first thing I want to say about deception is that there is too damn much of it. And I say that knowing that if there were no deception, we wouldn’t be having this conference, and a lot of us here would be looking for work elsewhere. I’ll also be covering some other points about deception:

• First, the old saying “there’s a sucker born every minute” doesn’t begin to approach the truth. I say we’re all born suckers, until and unless we train ourselves to listen carefully and think logically, something that’s relatively new in human history.
• Second, and apropos of the theme of this conference, there are a bewildering number of ways to deceive—sometimes even including telling the literal truth, or some portion of it.

My colleague Kathleen Hall Jamieson and I recently published a book on the subject of deception. We titled it unSpun (2007), and we gave it the subtitle: “Finding facts in a world of disinformation.” And we really do live in world of disinformation. Somebody out there may disagree—maybe a company with a lousy product and lousy sales, looking for a new advertising campaign. They might well think there’s not enough deception. So let me offer some evidence.

Big Fat Lies

Pick just about any weight-loss product and you’re likely to find a false or misleading claim. Bayer, for example, once claimed in TV ads that its “One-A-Day Weight Smart” vitamin pills could increase metabolism and bring about weight loss. When challenged to provide some evidence of that, they didn’t. Instead, they agreed to jerk the ads off the air and pay a $3.2 million civil penalty to the Federal Trade Commission. By then, of course, they had sold a lot of these so-called “Weight Smart” pills (Dizdul, 2007). Today, Bayer calls the product “Weight Smart Advanced,” as though it could bring about more weight loss. And it’s again being advertised on TV. But read the fine print on their Web site and they grudgingly admit—I quote—“It is not a weight control product” (Bayer HealthCare LLC, 2007). After their run-in with the ad cops, they carefully pitch the product as one that can help the body withstand diet and exercise, not as something that will magically boost metabolism and burn off weight without effort or sacrifice. Yet the very name, “Weight Smart Advanced,” implies otherwise. And who reads the fine print? Bogus weight-loss claims are so prevalent that the FTC in 2004 launched something it called “Operation Big Fat Lie,” starting with a round-up of half a dozen companies (Mack, 2004). But “Operation Big Fat Lie” has had, I submit, little to no effect.

And for a heaping helping of weight-loss deception, Google up “Hoodia.” An entire industry has sprung up selling powders, pills and patches, and even liquid drops and gel caps that somehow are supposed to be derived from a rare Kalahari Desert cactus called Hoodia Gordonii. CBS’s 60 Minutes made it famous when it showed Leslie Stahl nibbling a morsel of fresh cactus cut for her by a San tribesman (Stahl, 2004). In that form, it does seem to work as a natural appetite suppressant. The San Bushmen have used it for that purpose for generations. But you can’t get fresh Hoodia cactus at your supermarket, and major drug companies have been trying for years to figure out how to make an effective, marketable pill from this plant—so far with no success (Phytopharm PLC, 2006). Pfizer publicly gave up on it (Consumer Reports, 2006). Can you imagine any drug company giving up on the profits that a truly effective and marketable appetite suppressant pill would bring in, if there was a remote chance of success? And yet, dozens of hucksters are marketing supposed Hoodia products using all manner of false and deceptive claims. In our book, we call it “Hoodia Hoodoo.”

Beauty products are another obvious area where advertising is prone to contain empty or wholly false promises. In unSpun, we give an example that sounds ludicrous, and is: Emu oil. That’s the supposedly active ingredient in a face cream that is supposed to get rid of wrinkles, and whose marketer claims it is “much better than Botox!” (Deception Wrinkle-Cheating Cream, 2004). In fact, it “makes wrinkles almost invisible to the naked eye” and—get this—“it is possible your wrinkles will no longer even exist.” Oh yeah? The fact is there is zero scientific evidence that Emu oil has any—repeat, any—effect on face wrinkles. When we hounded the marketer for some proof of her claims, we got exactly one study of its cosmetic properties (Zemtsov, 1994). It was, of course, sponsored by Emu ranchers and reported the subjective opinions of a grand total of 11 test subjects. But more importantly it did not even attempt to assess effects on wrinkles. We searched the scientific literature for ourselves, and found zero studies of Emu oil as a wrinkle-reducer—and, of course, nothing comparing it to Botox. The claims for this product are pure hokum. The name of the product, appropriately enough, is Deception Wrinkle Cream.

In fairness to Emu-oil hucksters, deception is the foundation, if you will, of the entire cosmetics industry. Without deception, companies like Revlon, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, and even Procter & Gamble wouldn’t be where they are today. What are the odds that your hair will ever look like the long, shiny tresses of those models in the TV ads, even if you buy whatever hair goo they’re advertising? The fact is—according to a former cosmetics-industry chemist—all cosmetics companies are basically using the same chemicals and producing products of approximately equal quality (Harden, 1982). Much of what you pay for when you buy cosmetics, he said, is “make-believe.”

The same can be said of many other industries. Whole companies have been built on systematic bamboozling of the public. In unSpun we give the example of Listerine (Jackson & Jamieson, 2007), a product that was originally a not-very-good hospital antiseptic, until a legendary advertising campaign turned it into a hugely profitable household cure for bad breath. The trouble is, as medical authorities have been saying for decades now, Listerine does nothing to cure bad breath, and never has. No mouthwash is effective against bad breath—not according to the American Dental Association or any medical authority we can find (ADA, 2008). But I’ll bet that any teacher who asks their class what a good product is to use for bad breath will receive “Listerine” as a common answer. Eight decades of false advertising have had their effect.

Advertising is just full of deception. A few more examples:

• Bayer—again—once advertised its Aleve painkiller as “prescription strength relief without a prescription,” which it wasn’t. The maximum recommended dose for Aleve is actually half the normally prescribed dose for its prescription counterpart (NAD Report#4323, 2005).
• NetZero claimed its dial-up Internet access worked at “broadbandlike speeds.” Actually, cable modems are several times faster (NAD Report #4413, 2005).
• An over-the-counter cold medication called Cold-Eeze (2005) advertises that it is “clinically proven to cut colds by nearly half,” which just is not so. Cold-Eeze has been clinically tested any number of times, but the studies are inconclusive. They’re about evenly divided between those showing it has some effect and those showing none at all.

The Right to Lie

The Federal Trade Commission tries hard to police this area. But it has only a tiny staff devoted to this (FTC Organizational Directory, 2007). It also must grant the deceivers due process of law, with the result that false ads can air for months before any action takes effect. My guess is that the public thinks it is better protected from false ads than is the actual case. How often have we seen the words “As Seen on TV” used as a selling point, as if anything that appears on television must be true? Still the public at least has some legal protection against false advertising for products.

But not when it comes to politics. There’s no federal law preventing a candidate, or anybody, from making a false political claim (Jackson, 2004, June 3). A handful of states have tried this—I’m aware of three—and none of them have had much practical success. Either the courts strike down their laws as a core violation of the First Amendment, or they are too weak to provide a truly effective remedy, such as denying office to anyone found guilty of lying to get it. When it comes to political advertising, candidates have a legal right to deceive voters just about as much as they please. The only deterrent is the possibility of the falsehood being discovered and voters reacting with enough disgust to elect the opponent.

Not surprisingly, then, candidates do a lot of deceiving. In 2004, President Bush ran ads telling voters that John Kerry would take healthcare decisions out of the hands of doctors and have “bureaucrats in Washington” making them instead. That was just false. In fact, 97% of those who now have health insurance would have kept the same coverage under Kerry’s plan, according to neutral experts who analyzed it (Jackson, 2004, October 4).

Kerry, in turn, ran an ad accusing Bush of harboring a “secret plan” to cut Social Security benefits by up to 45%, another big deception. The plan in question wouldn’t have affected anyone already getting benefits, and would have allowed benefits for future retirees to grow, and grow fast enough to maintain current purchasing power. Benefits just wouldn’t have grown as fast as under current law, which pegs them to wages rather than inflation (Jackson, 2004, October 18).

There’s a lot of this—too much. Here are some more examples.

• In 2004, a radio ad by a pro-Kerry group claimed that members of the bin Laden family were allowed to fly out of the United States “when most other air traffic was grounded.” Actually, commercial air traffic had resumed a week earlier. The same ad also claimed that the bin Laden family members were not “detained.” Actually, 22 of them were questioned by the FBI before being allowed to leave, and their plane was searched as well. By the way, this ad stated—as fact—some falsehoods that were slyly implied but never stated outright in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 (Jackson, 2004, October 27).
• In 2006, the National Republican Congressional Committee ran a number of false or misleading ads, of which the most memorable was one accusing a Democratic House candidate of billing taxpayers for a call made from his hotel room to an adult “fantasy hotline.” The ad showed the candidate seeming to leer while a woman’s silhouette gyrated suggestively behind him. Actually, the call was a wrong number—one digit off from a New York state office the caller had meant to dial. The call lasted less than 1 minute and the charge to taxpayers was $1.25 (Jackson, Novak, Bank, Ficaro, & Kolawole, 2006).
• Another example from 2006—this one from a Democratic group—accused a number of Republican senators of voting against modern body armor for U.S. troops in Iraq. It showed bullets ripping into the torso of a dummy wearing the old-style flak jackets, as though these Republicans wanted GIs to die. In fact, the amendment these Republicans voted against contained not one word about body armor and body armor wasn’t mentioned once during the debate. And anyway, at the time the Pentagon already was buying up all the body armor the economy could produce (Jackson & Bank, 2006).
• And just in case you think candidates have gone straight in 2007, let me say they haven’t. On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani is fond of claiming that when he was mayor, adoptions rose 65 to 70%. In fact, adoptions were just 17% higher in his final year than they were the year before he took office. Giuliani arrives at his 70% figure by using cherry-picked statistics aggressively enough to leave an entire orchard bare (Novak & Miller, 2007).
• On the Democratic side, Bill Richardson has been claiming for months that he created 80,000 jobs in New Mexico since becoming governor. Actually, figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the gain at 68,100. In fairness, the total is still growing and will no doubt eventually reach the 80,000 figure. But you could say the same thing about a stopped clock: It will be right, too, eventually (Jackson & Banks, 2007).

These political deceptions matter, more than the jaded Washington press corps probably realizes. Voters really are deceived, and deceived about important matters of public policy. As we documented in 2004, majorities of voters go to the polls believing some of the false notions fed to them by campaign advertising. The National Annenberg Election Survey asked a large national sample of adults—about 1,700—about some partisan claims we had found to be false (Romer, 2006).

Two thirds of them said they believed the statement—repeated again and again by Kerry—that new jobs created under George Bush paid $9,000 a year less than the jobs they replaced, a claim unsupported by evidence. And nearly as many—62%—said they believed Bush’s often-repeated claim that Kerry’s tax plan would raise taxes on 900,000 small business owners (Romer, 2006). Not true, unless you count George Bush and Dick Cheney both as “small business owners” by virtue of their small amounts of outside business income, the ludicrously misleading standard used by the Bush campaign to define “small business owner” (Jackson & Jamieson, 2007). You can find other examples of our polling findings in unSpun. To be more specific, when I say voters “believed” these falsehoods I mean that they said they found them to be either “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful,” as opposed to the other choices which were “not too truthful” or “not truthful at all” (Romer, 2006). But you get the point. Deceptive advertising works. It really does deceive. Modern political campaigns, I submit to you, have become in effect multi-million-dollar disinformation efforts that succeed in misinforming the public. Now, as you mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface: Half-Truths and Other Fractions
• 1 Finding the Weasel Word in “Literally True”
• 2 Some Considerations for a New Theory of Deceptive Communication
• 3 Gray Area Messages
• 4 Deception by Selective Quotation
• 5 Truth Telling as a Journalistic Imperative
• 6 The Sin in Sincere: Deception and Cheating in the Visual Media
• 7 Sincerity and Hypocrisy
• 8 Accounts as Social Loopholes: Reconciling Contradictions Between Culture and Conduct
• 9 “I Read Playboy for the Articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences
• 10 Lying for Love in the Modern Age: Deception in Online Dating
• 11 Exoneration of Serious Wrongdoing via Confession to a Lesser Offense