A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (35 page)

Some people, including Noam Chomsky, have argued
:
Chomsky, N. (2015, May 25). The
New York Times
is pure propaganda.
Salon
. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/25/noam_chomsky_the_new_york_times_is_pure_proganda_partner/.

Achbar, M., Symansky, A., & Wintonick, P. (Producers), and Achbar, M., & Wintonick, P. (Directors). (1992).
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
(Motion picture)
.
USA: BuyIndies.com Inc. and Zeitgeist Films. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsiBl2CaDFg.

A 2011 fake tweet
:
Melendez, E. D. (2013, Feb. 1). Twitter stock market hoax draws attention of regulators. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/01/twitter-stock-market-hoax_n_2601753.html; http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/.

“The use of false rumors and news reports
”:
Farrell, M. (2015, July 14). Twitter shares hit by takeover hoax.
Wall Street Journal
. http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-shares-hit-by-takeover-hoax-1436918683.

Jonathan Capehart wrote a story
:
(2010, Sept. 7).
Washington Post
writer falls for fake congressman Twitter account.
Huffington Post
, updated Sept. 7, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/07/washington-post-writer-fa_n_707132.html; http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/09/obama_deficits_and_the_ditch.html.

Who is behind it?
:
This is taken verbatim from
The Organized Mind.
Levitin, D. J. (2014).
The Organized Mind
. New York: Dutton.

2014 congressional race for Florida’s thirteenth district
:
Leary, A. (2014, Feb. 4). Misleading GOP website took donation meant for Alex Sink.
Tampa Bay Times.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/misleading-gop-website-took-donation-meant-for-alex-sink/2164138.

A court case ruled that Degil
:
Pink, D. (2013). Deceiving domain names not allowed. Wickwire Holm. http://www.wickwireholm.com/Portals/0/newsletter/BLU%20Newsletter%20-%20January%202013%20-%20Deceiving %20Domain%20Names%20Not%20Allowed.pdf; Bonni, S. (2014, June 24). The tort of domain name passing off.
Charity Law Bulletin
342, Carters Professional Corporation. http://www.carters.ca/pub/bulletin/charity/2014/chylb342.htm.

vendor operated the website GetCanadaDrugs.com
:
https://www.canada drugs.com/; https://www.getcanadadrugs.com/ (no longer available); Naud, M. (n.d.). Registered trade-mark canadadrugs.com found deceptively misdescriptive. ROBIC. http://www.robic.ca/admin/pdf/682/293.045E-MNA2007.pdf.

MartinLutherKing.org contains is a shameful assortment
:
The inflammatory quote from the website comes from the book by Taylor Branch,
Pillar of Fire
, but the author notes that he did not hear the tapes himself, he took them from three FBI agents who reported them to him.

Stormfront, a white-supremacy, neo-Nazi hate group.
:
Sources which identify Stormfront as the Internet’s “first hate site” include:

Levin, B. (2003). “Cyberhate: A legal and historical analysis of extremists’ use of computer networks in America,” in Perry, B., ed.,
Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader
. New York: Routledge, p. 363.

Ryan, N. (2004).
Into a World of Hate: A Journey Among the Extreme Right
. New York: Routledge, p. 80.

Samuels, S. (1997). “Is the Holocaust unique?,” in Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed.,
Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide
. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, p. 218.

Bolaffi, G.; et al., eds (2002).
Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture
. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, p. 254.

Energy-drink company Red Bull paid
:
O’Reilly, L. (2014, Oct. 8). Red Bull will pay $10 to customers disappointed the drink didn’t actually give them “wings.” http://www.businessinsider.com/red-bull-settles-false-advertising-lawsuit-for-13-million-2014-10.

Target agreed to pay $3.9 million
:
Associated Press. (2015, Feb. 11). Target agrees to pay $3.9 million in false-advertising lawsuit. http://journal record.com/2015/02/11/target-agrees-to-pay-3-9-million-in-false-advertising-lawsuit-law/.

Kellogg’s paid $4 million to settle
:
Federal Trade Commission. (2009, April 20). Kellogg settles FTC charges that ads for Frosted Mini-Wheats were false [Press release]. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2009/04/kellogg-settles-ftc-charges-ads-frosted-mini-wheats-were-false.

The
Washington Post
also runs a fact-checking site
:
https://www.washing tonpost.com/news/fact-checker/.

Politifact summarized its findings
:
Carroll, L. (2015, Nov. 22). Fact-checking Trump’s claim that thousands in New Jersey cheered when World Trade Center tumbled. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/22/donald-trump/fact-checking-trumps-claim-thousands-new-jersey-ch/.

only one grandparent was born abroad
:
Sanders, K. (2015, April 16). In Iowa, Hillary Clinton claims “all my grandparents” came to the U.S. from foreign countries. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/16/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-flubs-familys-immigration-history-/.

322,000,000
:
The population of the United States, as of this writing. http://www.census.gov/popclock/.

For coronary heart disease
:
American Heart Association (2015). AHA Statistical Update.
Circulation,
131, p. 434–441. I thank McGill University Librarians Robin Canuel and Genevieve Gore for help in finding these statistics.

In 1968, Will and Ariel Durant wrote
:
Durant, W., & Durant, A. (1968).
The Lessons of History.
New York: Simon & Schuster.

The FBI announced in 2015
:
Federal Bureau of Investigation (2015, April 20). FBI testimony on microscopic hair analysis contained errors in at least 90 percent of cases in ongoing review [Press release]. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-microscopic-hair-analysis-contained-errors-in-at-least-90-percent-of-cases-in-ongoing-review.

Without these pieces of information
:
Aitken, C. G. G., & Taroni, F. (2004).
Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists,
2nd ed. Chicester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, p. 95, citing Friedman, R. D. (1996). Assessing Evidence.
Michigan Law Review, 94
(6)
,
1810–1838.

In one case in the U.K.
:
R v. Dennis John Adams, (1996) 2 Cr App R, 467;

And Aitken, C. (2003). Statistical techniques and their role in evidence interpretation. In Payne-James, J., Busuttil, A., & Smock, W., eds.,
Forensic Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

the
New York Times
described a mysterious formation
:
Blumenthal, R. (2015, Nov. 3). Built by the ancients, seen from space.
New York Times,
p. D2.

How much
more
productive and creative might she have been
:
I thank Stephen Kosslyn for sharing a version of this example with me.

Two twins were separated at birth
:
Grimes, W. (2015, Nov. 13). Jack Yufe, a Jew whose twin was a nazi, dies at 82.
New York Times
, p. B8.

They were reunited twenty-one years later
:
Much of this is taken verbatim from Grimes (2015), op. cit.

A statistician or behavioral geneticist would say
:
Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, personal communication.

if you ask a hundred people in a room
:
The formula is 1 – (1 – 1/2
⁵
)
¹⁰⁰
.

Paul McCartney and Dick Clark
:
I thank Ron Mann for this observation.

Larger samples more accurately reflect
:
Note that in a large sample, you are more likely to find an anomalous (outlier) observation than in a small sample, but when looking at the
mean
, the mean of the large sample is far more likely to reflect the true state of the world (because there are so many more observations that can swamp the anomalous one).

if the study was on the incidence of preterm births
:
Krämer, W., & Gigerenzer, G. (2005). How to confuse with statistics or: the use and misuse of conditional probabilities.
Statistical Science, 20
(3)
,
223–230. See also Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preterm birth. http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pretermbirth.htm.

Consider a street game in which a hat
:
Krämer, W., & Gigerenzer, G. (2005). Technically, they note, this is an incorrect enumeration of simple events in a Laplacian experiment in the subpopulation composed of the remaining possibilities.

similar mistakes were made by mathematical philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
:
Ibid.

Counterknowledge, a term coined by
:
Thompson, D. (2008).
Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History.
New York: W. W. Norton, p. 1.

Damian Thompson tells the story
:
Thompson, D. (2008), op. cit.

Shot on a consumer-grade camera
:
Trask, R. B. (1996).
Photographic Memory: The Kennedy Assassination, November 22, 1963
. Dallas: Sixth Floor Museum, p. 5.

A
handful
of unexplained anomalies
:
Thanks to Michael Shermer for this.

The difference between a false theory
:
This is a direct quote from Thompson, D. (2008), op. cit.

As Damian Thompson notes
:
Thompson, D. (2008), op. cit., p. 17. The previous two sentences are from pp. 16–17.

die each year of stomach cancer
:
National Cancer Institute. SEER stat fact sheets: stomach cancer. http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/stomach.html.

than of unintentional drowning
:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unintentional drowning: get the facts. http://www.cdc.gov/Homeand RecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html.

A front-page headline in the
Times
(U.K.)
:
Smyth, C. (2015, Feb. 4). “Half of all Britons will get cancer during their lifetime.”
Times.
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article4343681.ece.