Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
Illustration: a dossier collage of generic campaign-era posters, loudspeaker trucks and rally crowds.

Techniques · Classical

Card stacking

Card stacking is a propaganda technique that selects, omits or orders true facts to force one reading. What remains of the pile can only be read one way; the tell is a missing denominator, a missing counterexample or missing dates. It is one of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in 1937.

See 1387 card stacking examples in the archive

Illustration, not an archive object

Also called Selective omission, Cherry-picking

Select, omit, or order facts so the remaining pile can only be read one way.

How to spot Card stacking: the tell

Missing denominator, missing counterexample, missing dates.

What Card stacking is not

A short item that flags its own limits.

History and effect of Card stacking propaganda

IPA 1937; the technique behind most propaganda that never states an outright falsehood, since every individual fact used can be accurate.

It leaves the audience with a factually correct but structurally misleading picture, without ever asking them to believe something false.

Lineage: IPA 1937

How Card stacking propaganda works

Card stacking works on the pile, not the individual card. Each item can be accurate and checkable; the distortion lies in which items were chosen, which were left out, and the order they are laid down in. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis listed it among its seven devices in 1937, and Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee's The Fine Art of Propaganda (1939) described it as assembling the best or worst possible case by choosing among facts, illustrations and statements. The IPA's wording allowed falsehoods into the stack; the harder form to catch is built entirely from true material.

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The moving parts recur across eras. Selection: favourable cases, studies or witnesses appear and unfavourable ones are dropped. Missing context: a count without its denominator, a change without its baseline, a figure without its date range. Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics (1954) catalogued the statistical forms: choosing which "average" to report, cutting off a chart axis to magnify a small change, sampling for convenience. Ordering: a strong verified item placed first lends credibility to weaker items after it. Choice of comparison: the categories in a table are picked so that one side wins.

Two variants need institutional power. In suppression, the unfavourable evidence is removed from public view, so the remaining pile is the only one available. In the structural variant, no single author need intend the result: many separate decisions about what is published or passed upward add up to a skewed record, as with unpublished drug trials or intelligence caveats filtered out before a final briefing.

Why Card stacking propaganda works

Readers judge from what is in front of them. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) calls this "what you see is all there is": fast judgement builds the most coherent story from the evidence available and does not ask how much is missing. Consumer researchers Frank Kardes and colleagues describe the same pattern as omission neglect. Base-rate neglect (Kahneman and Tversky, 1973) explains why a vivid count without a denominator persuades.

Illustration: a censor's desk with letters under black redaction bars, red pencils, scissors and stamps.
Illustration, not an archive object
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Card stacking also defeats the usual defence. A reader who spot-checks claims finds each one true, and Timothy Levine's truth-default theory (2014) notes that people assume honesty until something triggers suspicion; accurate items give no trigger. For audiences already inclined to the conclusion, confirmation bias (reviewed by Raymond Nickerson, 1998) makes a one-sided pile feel like confirmation rather than selection.

Card stacking propaganda examples across eras and sides

  • The Bryce Report (1915, United Kingdom, government committee). The Committee on Alleged German Outrages published summaries of depositions from Belgian refugees and soldiers, with witnesses unnamed and not cross-examined, placing documented mass killings beside unverified mutilation stories so that the first lent credibility to the second. Historians later established that German troops killed about 6,500 Belgian and French civilians in 1914, while finding many of the most lurid stories unsubstantiated (Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, 2001).
  • "Sind wir die Barbaren?" (1916, Germany, Imperial government). Germany answered the "barbarism" charge with a chart comparing itself with England and France on selected measures of culture and social provision, categories that favour Germany and do not engage the accusations about Belgium. See Sind wir die Barbaren? (Are We the Barbarians?) (Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, J 151 Nr 2243).
  • The suppressed 1937 census (USSR, Soviet government). When the census counted fewer people than the leadership's public statements implied, a shortfall consistent with famine and repression deaths, its results were declared defective and withheld, leading census officials were arrested, and a 1939 census was published instead (Catherine Merridale, "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule", The Historical Journal, 1996).
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  • The Frank Statement (1954, United States, tobacco industry). The companies answered new lung-cancer studies by citing only the doubters. In United States v. Philip Morris (D.D.C. 2006), Judge Gladys Kessler found it part of a long effort to maintain public doubt. See A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers (Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century, 2007).
  • Gulf of Tonkin and Iraq (1964 and 2003, United States, executive branch). The NSA historian Robert Hanyok concluded that the 4 August 1964 attack did not occur and that signals intelligence was presented so as to deny decision makers a complete picture (President Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin 'Midnight Address'). In 2003 Colin Powell showed the UN mobile weapons labs whose main source, "Curveball", had been doubted inside U.S. and German intelligence; the Senate Intelligence Committee (2004) faulted the intelligence community's handling of the source; its report examined the intelligence agencies, not how policymakers used their product (Mobile Production Facilities for Biological Agents (UN Security Council slide)).
  • Unpublished antidepressant trials (2008 study, United States, pharmaceutical research). Comparing 74 FDA-registered trials of 12 antidepressants with the literature, Erick Turner and colleagues found about 94% of published trials positive against about 51% by the FDA's analysis, because negative trials were mostly unpublished or reported with a positive slant (Turner et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2008).
  • The Gyirong flood toll (2026, China, public security authorities). Official coverage centred on rescue effort and a toll of 43 dead on the Tibet side, while police punished higher counts as "rumours" and platforms deleted them. The higher counts are unverified; the tag rests on what was left visible to check the toll with. See The Gyirong flood and the official death toll (the Guardian, 8 September 2026).
  • The September Dossier (2002, United Kingdom, government). The Butler Review (2004) found that the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons omitted many caveats attached to the underlying Joint Intelligence Committee assessments and made the intelligence read as firmer than it was. The "45 minutes" claim referred to battlefield munitions, which the dossier did not say, and Lord Butler called it "a serious weakness that the Joint Intelligence Committee's warnings on the limitation of the intelligence were not made sufficiently clear in the dossier". The review stated "We found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence", so the case is one of omission in drafting (Butler Review 2004). It parallels the U.S. case above and is a government-to-public example from an ally.
  • Dead Americans at Buna Beach (1943, United States, wartime censors and Life magazine). U.S. wartime censorship had allowed only covered bodies and flag-draped coffins of American dead to be shown. After months of pressure by Life, President Roosevelt and the censors approved George Strock's photograph of three dead soldiers on Buna Beach, which ran in the 20 September 1943 issue, reported as the first photograph of dead American troops published in a U.S. publication during the war. The policy decided which part of the war's cost the public could see, and the release of this image changed it (Roeder 1993).
  • The Chernobyl announcement (1986, Soviet Union, government). The first Soviet public notice of the 26 April explosion was a brief TASS statement on the evening of 28 April, after Swedish monitors at the Forsmark plant had detected radioactive fallout that morning. The statement reported an accident and a damaged reactor and said measures were being taken, without giving the scale of the release (IAEA Bulletin 1986; Higginbotham 2019).
  • "26 countries aid South Vietnam" (c. 1965 to 1969, JUSPAO printing section for the South Vietnamese government, printed in Saigon). A split-panel poster in the archive sets aid shipments to the Republic of Vietnam against burning houses attributed to the Front and "Red China", and gives one figure of 26 aiding countries. The poster's figures are its own and unchecked here; the card-stacking lies in showing one side's aid and the other's violence and nothing else. See 26 Countries Around the World Aid South Vietnam (NARA, RG 306, 306-VP-6-264; NAID 26325856).

Sind wir die Barbaren? (Are we the barbarians?), German statistical chart, 1916

A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers, advertisement of 4 January 1954

Slide of alleged mobile biological-weapons laboratories shown at the UN Security Council, 5 February 2003

South Vietnamese poster: 26 countries aid South Vietnam beside a panel of burning houses

President Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin address, 4 August 1964

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"Sind wir die Barbaren?", German government counter-propaganda chart by Louis Oppenheim, 1916. Landesarchiv Baden-Wuerttemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The compared categories favour Germany and leave the Belgium charges untouched.

"A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers", Tobacco Industry Research Committee, 4 January 1954. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (published without a copyright notice). It cites the doubters and omits the studies that prompted it.

Slide from Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, 5 February 2003. U.S. Department of State, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (U.S. government work). The doubts about the main source were not on the slide.

"26 Countries Around the World Aid South Vietnam", Saigon printing-house poster, undated (NARA, RG 306, 306-VP-6-264; NAID 26325856). NARA unrestricted. Aid on one panel and ruin on the other, with the poster's own unchecked figures.

President Lyndon B. Johnson's address of 4 August 1964 (LBJ Library, NARA, via Wikimedia Commons). Public domain (U.S. government work). The NSA historian Hanyok later found the signals intelligence cited for the second attack was presented without the full record.

What is cherry picking?

Cherry picking is card stacking at the level of evidence: choosing the data points, studies, time windows or cases that support a conclusion and leaving out those that do not. The metaphor is the picker who takes only the ripest fruit and then describes the whole tree by it. The test is whether the full set is available and whether the selected items are typical of it. Three documented cases:

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  • Selective trial reporting (Vioxx, 2000 to 2005, United States, pharmaceutical). The 2000 VIGOR trial article on rofecoxib in the New England Journal of Medicine reported fewer gastrointestinal events than naproxen. On 8 December 2005 the journal's editors published an expression of concern that the article did not accurately represent the safety data available to its authors, because three myocardial infarctions in the rofecoxib group were left out after a prespecified cutoff date. The authors replied that the events were reported after the cutoff, and the dispute over who knew what and when was not fully resolved in print (Curfman et al., NEJM, 2005; Bombardier et al., NEJM, 2000).
  • Selective statistics in wartime (enemy strength in Vietnam, 1967, United States, military command). The CIA analyst Sam Adams argued from captured documents that irregular and self-defense forces belonged in the count of enemy strength, which MACV had restricted to main-force units (under 300,000); Adams and other analysts arrived at roughly double that. The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, excluded irregulars from its order of battle, on the ground that they were not regular combat forces. Adams and other CIA analysts argued that the order of battle needed to be revised upward. The exclusion was a definitional choice rather than an invented number, which is why the case fits selection, and Westmoreland and CBS later fought a libel suit over the question that ended without a verdict on the numbers (Adams 1994).
  • Selective review of evidence (sugar and heart disease, 1965 to 1967, United States, food industry). Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz (2016) used internal documents to show that the Sugar Research Foundation sponsored a literature review, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that singled out fat and cholesterol as dietary causes of coronary heart disease and downplayed evidence about sucrose; the foundation set its objective and received drafts.

Cherry picking is not the same as every summary. Presenting a representative sample with its selection rule stated, or a systematic review with pre-registered inclusion criteria, is the honest form of the same task.

How to spot Card stacking propaganda

  • What is the denominator: the population, period and rate the count belongs to?
  • What is the strongest opposing evidence, and is it mentioned at all?
  • Who chose the comparison, time window and baseline, and would another reasonable choice reverse the picture?
  • Are verified and unverified items mixed, and does the message say which is which?
  • Is missing evidence merely absent here, or removed from public view (deleted posts, withheld data, unpublished trials)?
  • Can the full set be checked: a trial registry, the full dataset, the original report?

Where Card stacking propaganda ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

5 items · Openly partisan advocacy. A lawyer's brief or campaign advertisement presents one side's…
  • Openly partisan advocacy. A lawyer's brief or campaign advertisement presents one side's best case in a genre everyone recognises. It becomes card stacking when a one-sided selection is presented as neutral or complete.
  • Summary is not stacking. Every short message omits. The test is materiality: would the omitted fact reverse or substantially weaken the conclusion? U.S. securities law draws a similar line in SEC Rule 10b-5, which forbids omitting a material fact needed to keep statements from misleading.
  • Neighbours. Partial disclosure offered as full is Limited hangout; a disclosure that does not travel with the message is Disclosure theater; Bothsidesism stacks the other way, presenting lopsided evidence as an even split; Whataboutism answers an accusation with a selected counter-comparison.
  • Falsified numbers. Once figures are altered rather than selected, the technique is plain falsehood.
  • Honest selection states its selection rule, gives denominators and date ranges, links the full data and names the strongest counter-evidence. Clinical-trial pre-registration, required by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors from 2005, builds this into an institution.

Then and now

1 item · Then and now: making every citizen a lookout (US home front 1942, "If You See Something,…

Sources and further reading

Sources

24 items · Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century . Basic Books, 2007.
  • Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century. Basic Books, 2007.
  • Adams, Sam. War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir. Steerforth Press, 1994.
  • Bombardier, Claire, et al. "Comparison of Upper Gastrointestinal Toxicity of Rofecoxib and Naproxen in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis." New England Journal of Medicine 343, 2000.
  • Butler, Lord. Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (Butler Review). HC 898, July 2004.
  • Committee on Alleged German Outrages (Bryce Committee). Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages. HMSO, 1915.
  • Curfman, Gregory D., Stephen Morrissey, and Jeffrey M. Drazen. "Expression of Concern: Bombardier et al." New England Journal of Medicine, 8 December 2005.
  • Hanyok, Robert J. "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964." Cryptologic Quarterly, National Security Agency (declassified 2005).
  • Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl. Simon & Schuster, 2019.
  • Horne, John, and Alan Kramer. German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial. Yale University Press, 2001.
  • Huff, Darrell. How to Lie with Statistics. W. W. Norton, 1954.
  • Institute for Propaganda Analysis. "How to Detect Propaganda." Propaganda Analysis, 1937.
  • International Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA Bulletin 28(3), 1986.
  • Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
  • Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. "On the Psychology of Prediction." Psychological Review, 1973.
  • Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee. The Fine Art of Propaganda. Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
  • Kearns, Cristin E., Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz. "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents." JAMA Internal Medicine 176(11), 2016.
  • Levine, Timothy R. "Truth-Default Theory (TDT)." Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2014.
  • Merridale, Catherine. "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule." The Historical Journal, 1996.
  • Nickerson, Raymond S. "Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises." Review of General Psychology, 1998.
  • Roeder, George H., Jr. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two. Yale University Press, 1993.
  • Turner, Erick H., et al. "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy." New England Journal of Medicine, 2008.
  • U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. 2004.
  • United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006).
  • The Guardian, reporting on the Clean Internet 2026 campaign and the Gyirong flood, 8 September 2026.

Case studies

132 items · Managing the news: France's 'bourrage de crâne' and Austria-Hungary's War Press Office…

Card stacking propaganda examples in the collection

All 1387 card stacking examples
Fragments of the Abydos king list from Ramesses II's temple, in the British Museum: rows of royal cartouchesNew Kingdom EgyptFragments of the Abydos king list from Ramesses II's temple, in the British Museum: rows of royal cartouches0000 · Card stacking, TransferGuardian of Britain's Northern Trade RoutesUnited KingdomGuardian of Britain's Northern Trade Routes1939 · Card stacking, Glittering generalitiesMet Duitschland voor een vrij Nederland (NSB film end card)NetherlandsMet Duitschland voor een vrij Nederland (NSB film end card)1941 · Glittering generalities, Card stackingContent noteConservation farming. Get more per acreUnited StatesConservation farming. Get more per acre1943 · Card stacking, TransferKeep up your payroll savingsUnited StatesKeep up your payroll savings1945 · Card stacking, Glittering generalitiesCommunism Gives You Security? Kapampangan version (poster distributed in Manila)United StatesCommunism Gives You Security? Kapampangan version (poster distributed in Manila)Apr 17, 1957 · Fear appeal, Card stackingChiến thắng rực rỡ của Khu Chiến Thuật Tiền Giang (Glorious Victory of Tien-Giang Tactical Zone)United StatesChiến thắng rực rỡ của Khu Chiến Thuật Tiền Giang (Glorious Victory of Tien-Giang Tactical Zone)1965 · Card stacking, Fear appealPhát triển chăn nuôi tại Vĩnh Bình (Animal Husbandry Development in Vinh Binh)United StatesPhát triển chăn nuôi tại Vĩnh Bình (Animal Husbandry Development in Vinh Binh)1966 · Card stacking, Plain folks

Card stacking in the watch briefs

All 135 briefs

Card stacking in campaign dossiers

Propaganda techniques related to Card stacking

BothsidesismWhataboutismDisclosure theaterRed herringFalse dilemmaGaslighting