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because they believed the magazine, the courts were no help. The attitude of the courts is that voters are grown-ups who deserve to hear all sides of an argument, even the falsehoods, and that it’s up to them to sort it out for themselves.
    Citizens might expect to find political spin aggressively debunked by the news media, but in our view they get far too little of that. There was a brief flurry of “factcheck”-style reports in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, but that was a departure from the norm. The fact that some news organizations were actually calling dubious claims “false” or “misleading” was itself considered newsworthy. The PBS
NewsHour
devoted a segment to the phenomenon on its evening newscast. Alas, the media fact-checking quickly faded once the election was over. The hard reality is that the public is exposed to enormous amounts of deception that go unchallenged by government regulators, the courts, or the news media. We voters and consumers must pretty much fend for ourselves if we know what’s good for us. In coming chapters, we’ll show you how.

Chapter 2
    A Bridesmaid’s Bad Breath
    Warning Signs of Trickery
    P OOR E DNA . S HE WAS ONE GREAT-LOOKING WOMAN, SO IT WAS strange that she couldn’t land a husband. And nobody would tell her why she was “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.” Edna wasn’t real, but her story, part of the ad campaign begun in 1923 that made Listerine lucrative, offers a window into how we can be manipulated by appeals to our fears and insecurities.
    The reason Edna was headed for spinsterhood—according to the ads—was breath so offensive that “even your best friends won’t tell you.” The ploy worked: Lambert sold tanker loads of Listerine. In 1999,
Advertising Age
magazine named the “bridesmaid” ad one of the hundred top campaigns of the twentieth century.
    The Listerine ads appealed to fear with a simple, unspoken message: use our product, or risk losing friends or even a future spouse because of putrid breath that you may not even know you have. Other Listerine ads played variations on the theme. In an ad from 1930, a dentist wonders why his patients have deserted him; he had never heard the whispers about his awful breath. The headline: “Do they say it of you?—
probably.
” Another ad, from 1946, shows a young man rejected at a job interview and asks, “In these days of fierce competition to get and hold a job, can you afford to take chances because of halitosis (unpleasant breath)?”
    WARNING SIGN:
If It’s Scary, Be Wary
    F EAR HAS BEEN A STAPLE TACTIC OF ADVERTISERS AND POLITICIANS for so long that you’d think that we would have become better at detecting their use of it. But fear and insecurity can still cloud our judgment. To put the lesson in a nutshell: “If it’s scary, be wary.”
    The FUD Factor
    Fear sells things other than mouthwash. In the 1970s, one of IBM’s most talented computer designers left to make and market a new machine. Gene Amdahl’s “Amdahl 470” mainframe computer was a direct replacement for IBM’s System 370, then the market leader, but sales were less than expected. Amdahl found that many corporate customers were afraid to buy his product even though by all accounts it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable than the IBM machine. He accused his former employer of using “FUD”—his acronym, meaning “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”—to discourage consumers from his new brand. Would Amdahl’s company be around to support their hot new product? Would IBM retaliate somehow? Would corporate purchasers be fired for taking a risk if things went bad?
    We see FUD being employed to sell all sorts of things. There are few Internet users who haven’t run into frightening pop-up messages along the lines of this hit from 2004–05: “WARNING: