Explanation:

Using verbal inflation or wild exaggeration to work up the audience and make them things are more serious than they really are.

Examples:

(i) Militant fundamentalists are trying to eliminate science from schools. (For this example also see loaded language and straw man.)

(ii) "A startling number of American children are in danger of starving . . . one out of eight American children is going hungry tonight." (CBS Evening News broadcast, March 27, 1991))
(This is based upon research in one rural county where many farmers were eligible for food stamps, but did not get them because they did not need them. Remember, farmers grow food. The statistic for this county was then extended to the entire United States, resulting in an absurdly hyperbolic claim. ("Media Eat Up Hunger Study," Media Watch, April 1991, p. 1)

(iii) "It looked like Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb."

(iv) "There is a health care crisis in this country." Note the use of "crisis" in virtually any subject to create undue alarm.

(v) "Cutting this program will be traumatic to the students. It is a rape of the education system."

(vi) "This is censorship!" (Note that in the United States censorship almost never occurs. Usually these are cases where school boards decide that a book is not appropriate for a certain age group or where a government agency decides not to fund an art project. No one is preventing people from going to the library or a bookstore to see the book, and no one is preventing artists from doing whatever they want. They just aren't getting money from that agency. They are free to get the money elsewhere.)

Proof:

Show that the person is using exaggerated language to describe the situation.