WHAT MAKES “NEWS”:

THE STORY spread like wildfire: the lie was delicious. George W. Bush's IQ is only 91—barely average. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop some media outlets from reporting it as news. The hoax perpetrators correctly figured that today’s journalists and commentators don’t have much time to check facts, or don’t bother, so if they provided their info with all the who, what, when, where, how, and why included, and the story sounded plausible, the thing might fly.

And it did. Example: A Chronicle reader, vacationing in Virginia Beach, sent in a copy of the August 21 issue of Port Folio Weekly, which not only ran the Presidential IQ study as news, but took the trouble to publish pictures of each President with his corresponding IQ. Another example: the Doonesbury cartoon on Sunday, September 2, which has a White House aide explaining the IQ study results to George W. Bush, and Bush doesn’t “get it.” Nowhere in the cartoon is there a caveat that the “study” was not true.

Here were the “facts” of the story: One of the projects of the “Lovenstein Institute,” based in Scranton, Pennsylvania since 1973, has been using the “Swanson/Crain system” of intelligence ranking to assess the IQs of U.S. Presidents. The “Institute” spent four months evaluating the IQ of George W. Bush in order to add their assessment to those made of earlier Presidents.

Claiming to be accurate within five IQ points, the “Institute” provided the following IQs:

The “study” claimed to have arrived at these figures based on each President’s scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced (without aid of staff), their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors.

Regarding George W. Bush, they attributed his low IQ rating to “his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other Presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.”

The complete bogus report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at the ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis.

The “study” is pretty obviously a politically-charged item, given that the Democrats come out looking so much smarter than the Republicans (with the exception of Nixon, which makes the hoax seem more believable because Nixon is widely regarded as having been smart, however flawed he may have been).

A website dedicated to debugging hoaxes, nicknamed Urban Legends, offers an extensive critique of the “study”; see: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/presiq.htm

The website report concludes, “Based on President George W. Bush’s extemporaneous speech-making, for example, he couldn’t ‘speak with clarity’ to save his life, but he was clearly far more intelligent than the insultingly low IQ assigned to him...And a recent article reports President Kennedy’s IQ as 119, far below the genius-level 174 ascribed to him here.”

The real news isn’t the IQ story, or even that it was a hoax. The real story is that so many people, including journalists, believed it—maybe because it just seemed so reasonable, or they wanted to believe it, or because it just plain made a good story. This is how propaganda gets out there. Truth takes a back seat to titillation.

Which leads us to wonder what other stories are popularly believed that aren’t true at all....

Would Gary Condit like to address this issue?