The Methods Get Sophisticated, but It’s Still the Same Old Shell Game

As a regular part of the journalism sequence I taught at UC Irvine, I devoted one class period to “critical thinking”--an essential quality not just to journalists but to citizens in any democratic society. And I always started that class by asking the students a series of generic questions.

How many of them were in favor of gun control? Opposed it? How many supported federal aid for the arts? Opposed it? And so on--perhaps a dozen such questions encompassing many of the major social issues of the day. Invariably I got a show of hands--and sometimes more vociferous reaction--on both sides of these issues.

Then I asked how many of those who supported gun control would extend it to hunting rifles or BB guns? And how many who opposed it would approve of a free market in Saturday Night Specials or automatic military weapons?

And how many of them approving federal aid to the arts would also approve of a government bureaucracy telling them what they can or can’t produce. Or how many of those who opposed it were willing to thus give up their local theater or ballet company? Or how many abortion advocates approved of abortion as a birth control device? Or abortion foes would be willing to adopt multiple children or pay for their care if abortion were outlawed?

By the time I got through a half-dozen of these exercises, the students were growling “foul,” and the point was made. They never should have answered any of my generic questions in the first place. I didn’t ask them if they approved of the principle of these things, I asked them to make sweeping generic commitments, and almost all of them did so enthusiastically. And this, of course, is the stuff of which propaganda is made and the means by which demagogues win public office.

If you love your country, you’ll deny basic rights to people who don’t believe as you do. If you love God and the word of the Bible, you’ll vilify homosexuals. If you love your wife, you’ll give up your night out with the boys. Bumper-sticker thinking.

This all came to mind because of three recent items that crossed my desk. The first was an article in The Times’ View section about a Florida attorney named Jack Thompson who instigated the campaign against the rap group 2 Live Crew and who recently ran unsuccessfully for the office of state attorney in Dade County, Fla. What caught my attention was one of his tactics in that campaign, an open letter to his female opponent insisting that she check the appropriate box among the following: “I, Janet Reno, am a homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual. If you do not respond . . . then you will be deemed to have checked one of the first two boxes.”

The second was a Toles cartoon in which a public opinion interviewer was asking a subject if he “supported sending troops to the Middle East.” When the subject said, “Sure,” the interviewer went on to ask if he “would be willing to die for the auto industry’s lousy fuel efficiency standards” and “how many American lives is it worth to be able to drive to work alone in your car” and “how many Arabs you’d be willing to see killed so you could wear a T-shirt in your house in the winter?”

Finally, I have a copy of a questionnaire that is being sent out to Orange County political candidates by the California Coalition for Traditional Values. It includes a series of 13 when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife type of questions. I was provided these questions by attorney Jim Toledano, the Democratic candidate for the California Assembly in Orange County’s 69th District. Although he answered the questions carefully and meticulously, he had to restate the premise in almost every case so the questions could be answered.

For example, one question asked: “Would you vote to prevent those individuals with the behavior-based lifestyle of homosexuality from being granted the special protection of minority status? Yes/No?” (Toledano’s partial answer: “Lifestyles are not deserving of special protections, and no serious person has ever advocated doing so, so far as I know. Sexuality is not a lifestyle; it is a fundamental part of each person’s physical and emotional makeup.”

These three examples are instructive for different reasons. Thompson is asking a flagrantly inflammatory and irrelevant question of his opponent and telling her that if she doesn’t answer on his terms--or tells him to stuff it--she stands convicted.

This reminds me of a program I once attended with a group of Orange County businessmen in which Sheriff Brad Gates discussed the problems of drugs in the workplace. At the end, he passed around drug-free pledges we were all urged to sign, with the strong implication that if we didn’t sign, we were probably part of the problem. I watched in astonishment as these business executives signed. They not only didn’t get angry at this gun at their heads, but I suspect that many of them--like me--probably enjoy an occasional nip of the most lethal drug of all: ethyl alcohol.

In the second instance, cartoonist Toles is pointing out--as I tried to in my class--that you can’t blindly embrace the general without also embracing some frequently uncomfortable specifics.

And in the final example, it is impossible to answer the Coalition’s question as stated without accepting two premises: that “lifestyles” have legal standing and that homosexuality is “behavior-based.” To those who find either premise unacceptable, the question is unanswerable.

All of these techniques are just variations of the old shell game, magnified and dressed up by modern technology and methodology. Psychologist Norman Bradburn and sociologist Seymour Sudman in their treatise on “Polls and Surveys” describe “loaded” questions as those that are “full of non-neutral terms and present arguments on only one side of an issue.” (Example, taken from a political poll: “Do you support appropriations for modernizing our defenses, which became dangerously obsolete as a result of cutbacks by the Carter/Mondale administration?”)

They also identify the “double-barreled question” which is structured “so that approval signified approval of both the ends and the means, and disapproval implies disapproval of both the ends and the means. Respondents who approve of the ends but not the means, or vice versa, are in a quandary.” (Example: “Are you in favor of economic sanctions against South Africa even though this means the perpetuation of apartheid?”)

Thus the poor guy who opposes apartheid but doesn’t approve of economic sanctions is stuck. His only rational solution is to refuse to answer the question--which isn’t a bad solution at all. It might be helpful to our political process if we all did more thinking about how we’re being manipulated and less answering.

I used to tell my students that the one bumper sticker they should all wear on their foreheads is, “Oh yeah?” As the baloney gets sliced thicker and thicker, “Oh yeah?” becomes a better and better answer. At least it gets you some thinking time.