Doublespeak. William Lutz
taker, when the poll was taken, how many people responded, how the poll was conducted, who was polled, how many people were polled, and how they were selected. That’s a lot of information, and rarely does a poll ever give you more than just the results.
In 1967, two members of Congress asked their constituents the following question: “Do you approve of the recent decision to extend bombing raids in North Vietnam aimed at the strategic supply depots around Hanoi and Haiphong?” Sixty-five percent said yes. When asked, “Do you believe the U.S. should bomb Hanoi and Haiphong?” however, only 14 percent said yes. In 1973, when Congress was considering articles of impeachment against President Nixon, a Gallup poll asked the question, “Do you think President Nixon should be impeached and compelled to leave the Presidency, or not?” Only 30 percent said yes to this question. They were then asked, “Do you think the President should be tried and removed from office if found guilty?” To this, 57 percent said yes.
The most popular form of polling these days is the telephone poll, where a few hundred people are called on the telephone and asked a couple of questions. The results are then broadcast the next day. The two ABC polls mentioned earlier were based on telephoning 384 and 382 people, respectively. Just remember that the U.S. population is over 245 million.
According to Dennis Haack, president of Statistical Consultants, a statistical research company in Lexington, Kentucky,
most national surveys are not very accurate measures of public opinion. Opinion polls are no more accurate than indicated by their inability to predict Reagan’s landslide in 1980 or Truman’s win in 1948. The polls were wrong then and they have been wrong many other times when they tried to measure public opinion. The difference is that with elections we find out for sure if the polls were wrong; but for nonelection opinion polls there is no day of reckoning. We never know for sure how well surveys measure opinion when elections are not involved. I don’t have much confidence in nonelection opinion surveys.
The Doublespeak of Graphs
Just as polls seem to present concrete, specific evidence, so do graphs and charts present information visually in a way that appears unambiguous and dramatically clear. But, just as polls leave a lot of necessary information out, so can graphs and charts, resulting in doublespeak. You have to ask a lot of questions if you really want to understand a graph or chart.
In 1981 President Reagan went on television to argue that citizens would be paying a lot more in taxes under a Democratic bill than under his bill. To prove his point, he used a chart that appeared to show a dramatic and very big difference between the results of each bill (see Figure 1). But the president’s chart was doublespeak, because it was deliberately designed to be misleading. Pointing to his chart, President Reagan said, “This red space between the two lines is the tax money that will remain in your pockets if our bill passes, and it’s the amount that will leave your pockets if their bill is passed. On the one hand, you see a genuine and lasting commitment to the future of working Americans. On the other, just another empty promise.” That was a pretty dramatic statement, considering that the maximum difference between the two bills, after five years, would have been $217.
Figure 1
President Reagan’s misleading and biased chart, compared with a neutral presentation regarding the same tax proposals.
The president’s chart showed a deceptively dramatic difference because his chart had no figures on the dollar scale and no numbers for years except 1982 and 1986. The difference in tax payments was exaggerated in the president’s chart by “squashing” or tightening the time scale as much as possible, while stretching the dollar scale, starting with an oddly unrounded $2,150 and winding up at $2,400. Thus, the chart had no perspective. Using the proper method for constructing a chart would have meant starting at $0 and going up to the first round number after the highest point in the chart, as done in the “neutral view” in Figure 1. Using that method, the $217 seems rather small in a total tax bill of $2,385.
What happened to the numbers on the president’s chart? “The chart we sent over to the White House had all the numbers on it,” said Marlin Fitzwater, then a press officer in the Treasury Department. Senior White House spokesperson David Gergen said, “We took them off. We were trying to get a point across, not the absolute numbers.” So much for honesty.
Figure 2
Misleading graph from the Department of Education, showing school spending relative to SAT scores.
In 1988 the Department of Education issued a graph that seemed to prove that there was a direct connection between the rise in elementary and secondary school spending and the decline in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (see Figure 2). The Reagan Administration had been arguing that spending more money doesn’t improve education and may even make it worse. But the chart was doublespeak. First, it used current dollars rather than constant dollars, adjusted for inflation. Because each year it takes more money to buy the same things, charts are supposed to adjust for that increase so the measure of dollars remains constant over the years illustrated in the chart. If the Department of Education had figured in inflation over the years on the chart, it would have shown that the amount of constant dollars spent on education had increased modestly from 1970 to 1986, as Figure 3 on page 51 shows.
Figure 3
Elementary/secondary education spending in constant dollars (billions).
Second, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test go from 400 to 1,600, yet the graph used by the Education Department (Figure 2) used a score range of only 800 to 1,000. By limiting the range of scores on its graph, the department showed what appeared to be a severe decline in scores. A properly prepared graph, shown in Figure 4, shows a much more gradual decline.
The Department of Education’s presentation is a good example of diagrammatic doublespeak. Without all the information you heed in order to understand the chart, you can be easily misled, which of course was the purpose of the chart. You should always be skeptical whenever you see a graph or chart being used to present information, because these things are nothing more than the visual presentation of statistical information. And as for statistics, remember what Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have said: ‘There are three kinds of lies—lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
Figure 4
More Education Doublespeak
In 1977 the Houston Chronicle reported that the father of a high school student received the following note from the school principal, inviting him to a meeting:
Our school’s Cross-Graded, Multi-Ethnic, Individualized Learning Program is designed to enhance the concept of an Open-Ended Learning Program with emphasis on a continuum of multi-ethnic academically enriched learning, using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross-graded, multi-ethnic learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person.
Two more paragraphs of similar language followed.
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