During the 2016 election season the fringe candidate Deez Nuts attracted a spate of attention, even though the candidate’s internet-based platform had nothing to do with that name. “I believe anyone who is found as an illegal immigrant in this country must be deported back to their country of origin, with the lone exception of being a minor,” it stated. “The reason we are in a budget crisis is because the two main parties refuse to compromise on this issue.” The platform additionally supported gay marriage, waffled on abortion, and supported tax incentives to corporations for hiring Americans.1
Obviously the attention was due to the candidate’s provocative pseudonym rather than this not particularly provocative platform. Except it would not be so obvious to the Federal Election Commission, whose 2016 presidential candidate filings included Ceedeez Nuts, Bofa Deez Nuts, Deez W. Nutz, Hold Ma Nutz, along with their more celebrated relative, Deez Nuts. More celebrated because Deez Nuts is the phrase previously used by rapper Dr. Dre on his album The Chronic; it went on to become a catchphrase.
Gaining further visibility after launching his (presumably not her) Deez Nuts for President 2016 website, the candidate landed in an opinion poll conducted in North Carolina that included the question “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Deez Nuts?”2 To give the Tar Heels their due, 81 percent said they were not sure. Another 13 percent had an unfavorable opinion, most likely taking offense at the name. However, 6 percent answered favorable—just enough to set the press sniffing. Tracking down Deez Nuts, the nation’s journalistic hounds soon discovered he was an Iowan named Brady Olson.
And fifteen years old.3
Lights, camera, action. For the next two months, the puckishly freckled boy wonder was the darling of news reports nationwide, including USA Today, Time magazine, CBS News, and NBC News.4
And then was news no longer. Beyond the ruse, not only was his platform nothing new, nor, finally, was the fact that teenagers are often among the nation’s best in pulling pranks. This one, however, was a doozy.
What is significant, however, is the way this fringe candidate achieved nationwide recognition—that being the poll in North Carolina. Why was the question asked? Possibly, though unlikely, it was included in an effort to gauge voter resentment—unlikely because resentment so clearly could have been at the candidate’s name rather than at electoral politics. More likely it was included in an effort to get the polling organization’s results noticed in the press. Which, indeed, happened. In this respect it stands out as an example of an ostensibly objective data-gathering organization competing with other polling organizations by adding a bit of spice to its data to entice attention from traditional news media, cable networks, and internet news sites. All of which were also competing with each other, as we’ve seen, by increasing the proportion of entertainment value in reporting news.
“I loathe this trend,” the Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza wrote in response to such data from another polling organization in 2016. It revealed that millennials preferred Darth Vader to Donald Trump as president. “Writing about President Vader, unless you run a Star Wars blog, isn’t a path to the future,” Cillizza told readers. “It’s a step, or several steps, backward.”5
Cillizza was right. Such findings are funny, but their impact is not. Emanating from a behavioral science that has earned the public’s trust, zany data propagate what could be termed mythinformation.6 Each of these bits of mythinformation contributes, even if just that bit, to altering perceptions of political reality—and perceptions, it bears mentioning, of science.
By 2016 both political reality and science were on shaky ground when the nation elected as its president the star of a reality TV show who did not believe the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans were causing climate change.