| Big Mac and a Side of Lies | |
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Dateline: 01/17/01
By David Emery
In the children's game called Telephone, participants gather in a circle and whisper a secret message from person to person until it comes back around to its starting point. As anyone who has ever played the game can attest, the message rarely returns to the ear of its originator intact. Error and bias creep in; details are misheard, misunderstood or misremembered and replaced with approximations. The end product may convey a meaning entirely different from the original.
That's a good illustration of how rumors are formed. Scratch the surface of any popular misconception and you'll likely find a grain of truth at its core, obscured by time and careless repetition. Of course, a topic has to be deemed important enough to spread gossip about for this process to occur - politics being a prime example. If there's even a remote potential for arousing political passions, the most benign statement of fact can set the rumor mill in motion and inflame controversy.
Just ask McDonald's.
As a U.S.-based corporation doing business amidst Arab-Israeli tensions in the Middle East, McDonald's has tried to cast itself as politically neutral - easier said than done, because the U.S. has long been a staunch ally of Israel. Late last year when fighting once again broke out between Palestinians and Israelis, Arab factions began calling for a boycott of American products, singling out familiar brand names like Coca-Cola, KFC and McDonald's. In an effort to ingratiate itself with Arab consumers and stave off a real boycott, McDonald's franchisees in Saudi Arabia announced plans to donate approximately 26 cents of the price of each meal sold to Palestinian children's hospitals during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Well, Ramadan had scarcely begun at the end of November 2000 when the following message began circling the globe by email:
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Subject: Fwd: Please read this - it concerns everyone McDonald's just announced that 30 cents out of every Dollar of Purchases in its 60 branches in Saudi Arabia will be donated as of today to the Palestinian injured at the occupied territories Please BOYCOTT their stores |
Despite a faint echo of truth which no doubt lent it credibility, the rumor misrepresented the facts. The donations were earmarked for children's hospitals, not injured Palestinians generally. The benefactors were Saudi franchise holders, not the McDonald's Corporation per se. But the rumor mill ground on...
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