So the assumption of political experts is wrong. It isn’t the less informed who are likely to be influenced by fear-driven advertising. It is the more informed. Apparently, greater awareness and commitment make emotional messages more resonant—and being better informed is no guarantee that Head will step in and tell Gut to relax.
Still, if the political experts were wrong about who is more likely to be influenced by fear, they were dead-on about the central role played by emotion in political marketing. “The audiovisual ‘packaging’ may be paramount to their effectiveness,” Brader writes. Remove the word “may” and replace it with “is” and you have the standard advice supplied by every political consultant. “A visual context that supports and reinforces your language will provide a multiplier effect, making your message that much stronger,” advisesRepublican guru Frank Luntz in his book Words That Work. But more than that, “a striking visual context can overwhelm the intended verbal message entirely.” Luntz makes his point by recounting a story Lesley Stahl relates in her autobiography, Reporting Live. In 1984, Stahl filed a story for the CBS Evening News that was so critical of the Reagan White House she feared her sources in the administration “would be angry enough to freeze me out.” But after the story aired, the deputy chief of staff told her the White House loved it. Stahl asked him, “Didn’t you hear what I said?” The politico responded: “Nobody heard what you said. . . . You guys in televisionland haven’t figured it out yet, have you? When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. I mean it, Lesley. Nobody heard you.”
Even in 1984, this was old hat. “The real question in political advertising is how to surround the voter with the proper auditory and visual stimuli to evoke the reaction you want from him,” wrote Tony Schwartz, a political consultant, in 1973. Five years earlier, the campaign of Richard Nixon ran a television ad in which pictures of a serene-looking Hubert Humphrey were interspersed with rapid-fire images of riots, street fighting, and destruction in Vietnam. Not a word was spoken; it was a pitch aimed exclusively at Gut. If an ad like that were run today, psychologists might see it as proof that spin doctors were learning from their work, but the truth is that spin doctors—like Amos Tversky’s “advertisers and used car salesmen”—figured it out first.
Of course, it’s not hard for most people to believe that spin doctors traffic in fear. Nor is it a stretch to imagine corporations boosting sales with similar techniques. They are self-interested, after all, and they advance their interests however they can.
Activists, nongovernmental organizations, and charities are another matter. They have their own interests, as everyone does. And they, too, could use fear to expand memberships, boost donations, and increase their media profile and political clout. But unlike spin doctors and corporations, activists and others explicitly seek to advance the public good—it’s the very reason they exist—so it seems strange that they would scare the very public they wish to serve. And yet it is precisely that high-minded motivation that so often leads activists, NGOs, and charities to market fear.
Leaving my neighborhood grocery store one afternoon, I came across a poster featuring a sad-eyed boy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words I’M HUNGRY. The caption read: “One in five Canadian children lives with hunger.” It was an appeal for donations to “The Grocery Foundation,” an organization established by the big grocery-store chains and food companies to support school breakfast programs and other programs for needy kids. The cause is irreproachable. But I’d never heard that statistic before and I couldn’t believe the situation was this dire. The wording was also odd. What does it mean that a child “lives with” hunger? Does that mean they experience it every day? Once a week? How is hunger defined and measured? I wanted to know more, so I e-mailed the executive director of the foundation, John McNeil.
In his e-mailed response, McNeil directed me to other nongovernmental organizations working in this field. But they didn’t know the source of the number, so I contacted McNeil again. This time he sent me an excerpt from a letter written by Sue Cox, the former head of the Daily Bread Food Bank and “an acknowledged authority on hunger and poverty,” according to McNeil. Cox’s case for the one-in-five statistic went like this: first, “child hunger and child poverty are inextricably linked”; second, Statistics Canada says the “current rate of child poverty is one in six”; third, the real number is likely closer to one in five because the telephone survey that was used to come up with the one-in-six number would not catch very poor people who can’t afford telephones.
What Cox didn’t mention is that Statistics Canada has no data on “child poverty” or any other kind of poverty. What the agency has is something called the “Low Income Cut-off,” or LICO. That’s where the one-in-six number came from. But the LICO is not a “poverty” number, as Cox claimed. It is a measure of relative deprivation only, intended to identify “those who are substantially worse off than the average,” in the words of Ivan Fellegi, the head of Statistics Canada. If the income of the top 10 percent in the country doubled tomorrow, the number of people who fall below the LICO would soar—even though all the people who suddenly dropped below that line would have exactly the same income they had before. The statistics agency has repeatedly stated that it does not consider LICO to be a measure of poverty. “Statistics Canada does not and cannot measure the level of ‘poverty’ in Canada,” wrote Fellegi.
So the basis for the claim that “one in five Canadian children lives with hunger” is this: A number that Statistics Canada says is not a measure of poverty was used as a measure of poverty; the word “poverty” was changed to “hunger”; and the number was arbitrarily reduced from one in six to one in five.
I e-mailed McNeil again and told him I thought his number was dubious. Would he care to respond? “It was not my analysis,” he wrote. “However, I think we have sufficiently debated your concern; whether it’s one in four or one in six, there are a lot of Canadian children wandering around with empty bellies, which we’re trying to do something about.”
The cause is worthy and the intentions honorable, McNeil seemed to be saying. Why worry about the accuracy of information used to advance a worthy cause?
A similar scenario played out in the United States in 1991, when an American activist group named the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) released a report claiming “one out of eight American children” had gone hungry at some time in the previous year. The report garnered widespread press coverage despite being fatally flawed by an unrepresentative survey sample and questions drafted too broadly to be meaningful. On the most precise question—“Did any of your children ever go to bed hungry because there was not enough money to buy groceries?”—just one-third of those counted in the report as “hungry” said “yes.” That alone should have cast doubt on the validity of the report, but almost every new story about the report passed along the statistic as if it were unchallengeable fact. (Someone at CBS Evening News not only accepted the study as hard fact, but misread it in almost comical fashion—which resulted in Dan Rather leading off the newscast by announcing, “A startling number of American children in danger of starving. Dan Rather reporting. Good evening. One out of eight American children is going hungry tonight.”)