nalists. Every day there are newspaper pages and television newscasts to be filled, and an expert who can deliver a jarring piece of wisdom is always welcome. Working together, journalists and experts are the architects of much conventional wisdom. Advertising too is a brilliant tool for creating conventional wis- dom. Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as a powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasnt a runaway suc- cess until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis"-a then obscure medical term for bad breath. Listerines new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mates rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Lis- terine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made hali- tosis." In just seven years, the companys revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million. However created, the conventional wisdom can be hard to budge. Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and devout critic of George W. Bush, bemoaned this fact as the Presidents reelection campaign got under way in early 2004: "The approved story line about Mr. Bush is that hes a bluff, honest, plainspoken guy, and an- ecdotes that fit that story get reported. But if the conventional wis- dom were instead that hes a phony, a silver-spoon baby who pretends to be a cowboy, journalists would have plenty of material to work with." In the months leading up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, dueling   experts floated diametrically opposite forecasts about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. But more often, as with Mitch Snyders homeless "statistics," one side wins the war of conventional wisdom. Womens