Distraction
Drawing the audience's attention to something vivid and beside the point, so that the matter the speaker would rather not discuss drops out of view.
Attention is finite and can be spent. The device spends it: a spectacle, a scandal, a controversy, an outrage, anything loud enough to fill the space where the inconvenient question would have been. Unlike whataboutism, which answers a charge with a counter-charge, distraction does not answer at all; it changes what the audience is looking at. The inconvenient matter is not refuted, only crowded out.
Juvenal's "bread and circuses" is the ancient description, the Roman public kept content with grain and games while its political role shrank. The modern political form has its own name, the "dead cat," for the tactic of throwing something outrageous on the table so that everyone talks about the cat. Exploits Availability Heuristic and Salience Bias.
Historical examples
Juvenal's tenth satire observed that the Roman people, who once handed out commands and legions, now "anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses." The line has described the device for nineteen centuries: a public supplied with spectacle asks fewer questions about power. The grain dole and the games were real policy, and so was their effect.
Juvenal, Satires 10.77–81; Veyne, Paul. Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. Abridged ed. London: Allen Lane, 1990.
Lippmann's Public Opinion noted that the news can attend to only a few things at a time and that whoever supplies the vivid event sets what the public thinks about; Herman and Chomsky later described the mechanism structurally. The "dead cat" phrase, attributed to the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, is the tactical version: produce the vivid event on purpose.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922; Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
In advertising and commerce
Crisis-communication practice includes releasing good news, a product launch, a charitable gift, a celebrity partnership, in the window when bad news would otherwise dominate. Coombs's standard textbook describes "diversion" among the response strategies, and the trade press reports launches timed against investigations often enough to have a name for it.
Coombs, W. Timothy. Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019.
Find the biggest story of the week. Then find a story that was building the week before and has gone quiet. Is there a connection?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
Asked about the missing funds, the chairman announced a new stadium and spent the rest of the meeting on it.
What to notice. The question is not answered or deflected onto the critic; it is replaced by a spectacle.
On the morning the audit was published, the department released a celebrity's visit to a school, with photographs.
What to notice. A vivid, timed event fills the attention the audit would have taken.
"Let's not get bogged down in the numbers. Have you seen what the other party's candidate wore yesterday?"
What to notice. The substantive question is abandoned for something trivial and vivid; no counter-charge is made.
Sources
- Juvenal. Satires. Translated by Susanna Morton Braund. Loeb Classical Library, 2004.
- Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
- Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon, 1988. ISBN 978-0375714498
- Coombs, W. Timothy. Ongoing Crisis Communication. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. ISBN 978-1544331959