Whoppers with Sleaze | Walter Olson | Cato Institute: Commentary

Whoppers with Sleaze | Walter Olson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Staffers at the Health Department were sharply divided about whether the proposed ads went beyond the available science in demonizing sweet drinks. The city's health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, overruled three subordinates, including his chief nutritionist, to push things forward.

• 'The scientists, [the city's nutritionist] said, 'will make mincemeat of us.' ' 'Basic premise doesn't work,' said a Columbia professor of pediatrics and clinical medicine whom the city consulted."

"Incredibly, New York City's latest ad, on salt in processed foods, is even worse. It shows a can of soup bursting at the seams with table salt, whole mounds and piles of it. The city's underlying point is not 100 percent off-base — healthful in most other ways, conventional canned soup is a relatively salty food — but the actual amount of salt in a can is more like 1 teaspoon, not the third of a cup or more depicted in the city's ridiculously exaggerated photo. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Bloomberg soup ad is built on a visual lie.

What would happen if a private advertiser tried to get away with imagery as misleading as this? Well, in 1970, in a case still taught in business schools, Campbell's got caught manipulating the soup pictures in its ads; its photographers had put marbles at the bottom of the bowl so that the pleasing vegetables would be more visible on top. The Federal Trade Commission filed a deceptive-advertising complaint to make the company stop."