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Stage magicians need quick fingers, but their biggest
tool for fooling us is called misdirection.
The idea
is to get you to focus on one part of the act, perhaps the
comely assistant, and while you're staring at that, the
magician is stacking the deck or stuffing silk kerchiefs up
a sleeve.
Misdirection apparently works well on a bigger scale, too, judging by recent events.
Take the North Carolina case of the Food Lion grocery chain vs. ABC News. It started when ABC had some reporters apply for jobs at a Food Lion store. They carried tiny hidden cameras, which allowed them to capture footage of Food Lion employees washing tainted chicken with bleach to destroy the odor, and they also caught people changing date stickers on beef so that it could be sold past the expiration date.
Now, it would seem to me that the real issue is whether Food Lion was deliberately selling bad meat, stuff that can make you sick or worse.
But not according to Food Lion, which conceded that profit came before any responsibility for its' customers well-being.
Instead, the chain went after ABC and its reporters for
fraud (the reporters submitted job applications which
didn't indicate that they were currently employed by a
network), trespassing (thus they were illegally on company
property) and breach of loyalty.
The loyalty
issue apparently means there's a
legal duty for an employee to be loyal
to a
corporation -- the same outfits which demonstrate their
loyalty to employees by union-busting, down-sizing and
out-sourcing.
The jury agreed with Food Lion, sticking ABC for $5.5 million in punitive damages last week.
And so the magician succeeded in misdirecting attention. The issue becomes not whether Food Lion poisons its patrons, but how ABC gathered the information.
Similarly, in recent days, the issue isn't who might have committed a murder in Boulder, but who leaked information from the coroner's office. It isn't whether Newt Gingrich planned to violate a pledge not to spin a House Ethics Committee finding, but how a tape recording made from a scanner fell into congressional hands.
Generally, these misdirection efforts succeed, although I recall one time when they didn't. It was in 1980 or so, and the Pueblo Chieftain had just hired a new reporter who also held a teaching certificate.
He went to work for the school district for a few weeks as a substitute teacher, then returned to journalism and wrote about what he saw and heard.
Naturally, the school district responded with outrage about fraud and deception, although its attorneys couldn't find any laws that had been broken.
The series that ran in the Chieftain was good reading, since it reflected what teachers and administrators actually said and did, instead of the sanitized pap that emerges from public-relations specialists.
The teacher who utters platitudes about how Junior
needs to develop his social skills
actually sees
Junior as an officer in the local chapter of Future Felons
of America -- that sort of thing. From my remote vantage,
it appeared that the school district failed to misdirect,
and that Pueblans were talking about the district's
conduct, not the Chieftain's.
Why do such revelations, seldom surprising in any way, cause such a stir when they appear in the media?
I suspect it's because we're usually fed soft and mushy drivel, and so anything spicy or chewy is upsetting.
In other words, we're accustomed to seeing canned and
pureed stuff like Food Lion takes its responsibility
seriously to provide its customer with fresh, wholesome
meats...
or The Pueblo Public Schools believe that
every student should be encouraged in every possible way to
reach his/her full potential as a productive
citizen....
In theory, reporters are skeptical people who practice
Ronald Reagan's injunction: Trust, but verify.
In
practice, reporters are overworked and overwhelmed, and
seldom have the time or energy to examine critically the
alleged information that flows across their desks. So they
often take the easy course, and the result is pap.
When we encounter something different, we feel alarmed. Our comfortable order has been disturbed. This is an unpleasant sensation, and we attempt to rectify it.
But we, like the reporters, seldom have the time or energy to do the job right and go after the real problem. Instead, we get misdirected, and blame the newspaper or network -- after all, if they hadn't bothered to do the story, then we wouldn't be upset.
Combine that natural tendency toward the easy path with the expertise of modern spin doctors, and it's little wonder that we so frequently succumb to the oldest trick in the magician's book, even though we should know better.
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