FOLK TRUTHS: HOW THE MEDIA USE THEM TO LIE
by H. Peter Metzger, Ph.D. (9/8/88)

By  "Folk  Truths"  I  mean  claims  that  are held to be facts by the
media, but which can be  seen,  after  serious  reflection  by  almost
anyone,  to  be  obvious  lies. They are nothing more than propaganda,
stories made up to support a political conclusion, but with one  major
difference:  They  are  all dolled up in scientific mumbo-jumbo, which
makes them acceptable to people who wanted  to  believe  them  in  the
first  place  but  who  needed  a  better reason than merely their own
political passion.

Examples of folk truths range from  the  basis  for  the  reasons  why
Americans  of  Japanese  descent  were forced into relocation camps in
America during World War II, to how giant public works projects,  like
dams  and pipelines, were cancelled over fears that they would disturb
a rare fish or a plant, which turned out later wasn't  so  rare  after
all.  In looking back on some of these fiascos, it's easy ridicule the
folk truths of another time. But it's always been more amusing  to  me
to  investigate  the  folk truths of today, at a time when most people
still believe in them. And what I find most interesting is not so much
the debunking of them (which  Petr  does  so  well  in  AtE)  but  the
mechanism by which these folk truths got started in the first place.

And  so I thought you FREEMEN might be interested in some I've tracked
over the years. I'll start  with  this  currently  fashionable  claim:
"America  is  such a cruel country that its old people have to eat cat
food in order to survive".

Naturally, since we're talking about lies here, the people that  start
these  folk  truths have very personal reasons for doing so. Sometimes
it's just for the ego-pumping notoriety of it all, but usually it's  a
political  activist  that  makes  an  attention-getting claim for some
special political advantage. That's how this one got started: In  1985
a woman from a small Vermont town testified before the governor's task
force  on  hunger  that  her  neighbor had resorted to eating pet food
because she couldn't afford to buy regular meat on  her  fixed-income.
Many  similar claims have been made before and since, but this one led
directly to justification by scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The media find it difficult to make a big issue by quoting the  claims
of  a  single  person.  So  the original claim must be strengthened by
having a group of authorities jump on the bandwagon. One authority  is
seldom  enough but when a single authority can be made to seem to be a
much larger group (as in "The New York  Times  says  ...",  when  it's
really  only  one reporter doing the writing), then a single authority
will do. That's what happened in this case:  In  1986,  a  second-year
medical   student  wrote  to  The  New  England  Journal  of  Medicine
concerning the above claim. In  a  letter-to-the-  editor  (not  in  a
scientific  article,)  she compared the nutritional values of cat food
(as supplied  by  the  companies)  with  published  recommended  daily
allowances  and  found  that  they  presented  a  "benign  nutritional
profile", not a surprising conclusion since cats live off the stuff.