Chapter Five
5.14 Exercises for Chapter Five
enough to mislead and manipulate the viewer, without
flu for a week, the pipes in her bathroom burst, and she
telling an outright lie.
broke up with her boyfriend. After all that bad luck, she is surely due for better times.
Puf f e ry / e xag g e r ate d c lai ms : Puffery is an exaggerated claim which is obviously untrue, but gets your
Two studies reported in the New England Journal of
attention anyway. I once saw a billboard advertisement
Medicine in July 2007 found that the risk of cancer,
for women’s cosmetics that made the claim: “We make
heart disease, and diabetes were reduced when the stom-
women so beautiful, other women will want to kill you.”
ach size of obese patients was reduced.
Taken at face value, this statement is clearly, painfully
100
false. But the statement still creates the impression in
I recently purchased a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted scale
the viewer’s mind that women who use that product
model of the starship Enterprise. But I keep it in a safety
will become enviable. Similarly, television commercials
deposit box in a bank vault. It’s so precious to me that I
for trucks or fast cars might tilt the camera, to make the
don’t want anyone to see it.
vehicle look like it can easily drive up a very steep slope. The image tells no lies, but most people don’t notice the
These statues magically move by themselves, in the
camera tilt, especially if the shot lasts only half a second.
middle of the night. But only the very virtuous can see
So the impression left on the viewer is a somewhat
them do it.
misleading one. Of course there was a cover-up! And the fact that you Pus h p oll i n g : This is a type of advertising technique
can’t find out what really happened is evidence that the
normally used by political campaigns. Large numbers of
cover-up was very effective!
individuals are contacted directly, usually by telephone, and invited to participate in a survey. But the caller is
Everyone who “Shares” this picture on Facebook will
not actually collecting data. Instead, the caller is trying
receive a free Kindle Fire HD.
to influence the contacted person’s thinking about an issue (and her vote!) use a series of leading questions,
The MonsterCar Corporation is actually majority-
rhetorical questions, and carefully designed framing
owned by a conglomerate of foreign investors who use
languages. It might drop vague hints about the bad be-
their profit to fund radical militant religious groups.
haviour of a political opponent, or an innuendo about
So if you are driving a MonsterCar, you’re supporting
the unreliability or untrustworthiness of a party.
terrorism! Every once in a while, you might notice the Internet
5.14 Exercises for Chapter Five
access on your phone slowing down or stopping for no apparent reason. Sometimes it’s ordinary net traffic. But
Consider the following situations, and decide whether it is reasonable to doubt what is claimed, and why (or why not).
sometimes it’s the spyware on your phone, gathering all your phone calls, text messages, emails, web sites visited, and camera pictures, and sending them to the government. It even tells the government your movements,
Early yesterday morning, just as the sun was rising, Jeff spotted what looked like a giant sea serpent rising through the mists of the lake. Jeff has never lied before. He must have seen the Loch Ness monster. Shelly has had a terrible month. She was in bed with the
using the map software.