Unfortunately, there appears to be very little I can do to stop blatant falsehoods from manifesting themselves on my television screen. It’s really everywhere you turn. And if an ad isn’t lying directly about their product, they are trying to sell their product based on inaccurate concepts. I saw this commercial for fig Newtons where this cowboy was laying in a hammock and he takes a bite out of his cookie and the crunch creates an earthquake that knocks him out of the hammock. And the commercail voice says, "Looking for some quite time? Get a quieter cookie" Now I don’t think I need to tell you that the entire premise of this commercial is fictional at best. But what the commercial is trying to put on us is false claims about the competition. They are claiming that cookies other than Newtons are, not less delicious--which is the traditional standard by which cookies are based--but rather that they are too loud. And forget about the fact that this is a deceitful way of planting superfluous and unfounded doubts about other cookies in our minds. The real issue here is that adjectives involving sound (e.g. quiet, loud, etc.) are not applicable to cookies, or really any noun that does not produce sound. It is true that when you bite into a cookie, it may make a crunch noise, but the same goes for virtually any noun that can be bitten in half. The real fact of the matter is that all cookies produce the same level of noise, which of course is no noise. Sure, when bitten, dropped on the floor, or exploded with dynamite, a sound may be heard, but the real issue here is that they don’t make noise. So the correct way of getting their point across would have been, “Looking for some quiet time? Get a softer cookie, which creates a less amplified sound when bitten into with teeth.” And don’t even get me started on the fact that when the cowboy bites into the cookie, it creates an earthquake which causes him to fall out of his hammock. This is suggesting that non-Newton cookies are responsible for natural disasters which is the second most ridiculous notion imaginable, second only to the idea that the non-Newton cookie caused him to fall out of the hammock. Because I don’t know exactly how intense they are suggesting other cookies are, but I personally have never had a cookie whose crunch registered higher than a 2.3 on the Richter scale. And I certainly know that once one is firmly secure within a hammock, one does not simply fall out of its confines, even if there is a cookie-related earth tremor raging all around.

These are all examples that show how deceit in advertising manifests itself through gross exaggerations and mis-representations. But there are even television commercials that come out and blatantly lie gross point blank to our faces. For instance, I can say with a 100 percent margin of guarantee, that life most certainly does not demand Lysol. As a matter of fact, life doesn’t even request Lysol. On a personal level, I can say for myself that my life specifically requests an absence of Lysol. At first I wasn’t sure. I saw that the advertisement said “Life Demands Lysol”, so I said to myself, “I can’t say that I agree… but then maybe I’m not yet adept at interpreting messages that relate to the Lysol aspect of my life.” So I went ahead and purchased some Lysol, and frankly it began the darkest and most painful chapter of my life so far. My gerbil died, my collectables got ruined in a flood, and I got sick from a rare strain of bacteria that had developed on my countertop. So in essence, to market your product with the suggestion that life demands it is not only a blatant lie, but couldn’t possibly be true even if each life could demand specific items from the market. Because unless bacteria are suicidal by nature, the Lysol company really screwed themselves over with this self-extracting tapestry of a lie.

What it all comes down to is, if you see it on TV, don’t believe it. And if you hear it from a friend, and you happen to know that that friend owns a TV, don’t believe it. If you hear it from a friend who doesn’t own a TV, but you happen to know that he or she has friends who do own TVs, don’t believe it. And if you read it in a book, and that book was written after the point at which TVs were invented, try to get it backed up by an older source.