‘Spinning’ out of control

Ralph Grabowski has picked up on one of my favourite gripes. Describing PR or marketing ‘spin’ as Logical fallacies, he notes how many firms quote ‘anonymous authority’ to describe themselves as "leading" (as in "Cadweb is the leading and most established provider of Project Extranet services in the UK" – an extravagant claim for a business that, according to its own statistics markets a solution used on just 179 projects, whereas BIW has more than 20 times as many. Some lead!).