So a guy walks into a bar...and unfortunately, there were no major sports events scheduled, so the television above the bar was tuned to Fox News. The guy next to him (who's been there so long that the stool has a permanent indentation for his ischium and they send the light bill directly to his house...)tries to strike up a conversation with some tired old arguments.
The kind of logical tricks that Fox-types use are familiar to philosophers and those who study debate. But they generally pass right over the heads of most honest men (and women.)
The question is--could you recognize them and respond?
Here are just a few of the ways in which Fox News twisted the concept of logic to create its own news (Not hard to find! Most taken from one morning, Saturday Jan 22):
Guilt By Association: (Using two different concepts/persons in contiguity that are unrelated.) "Hillary Clinton's website is getting an incredible number of hits...(The "Friends" continue)almost as many as some porn sites. Do you think she can beat the porn sites?" (Conversation degenerates to giggling about porn.)
[Association can be visual as well as verbal. A few months ago, there was a serious explosion in a chemical plant that (at least for the first few hours) was thought to be a possible act of domestic terrorism. Every time the scene of the explosion was shown, the crawl had a totally unrelated news blast on illegal immigration.]
Fallacies of Evidence and Causality: (Making up, cherry picking or distorting evidence.) To author Dinesh D'Souza: "You believe the far left is responsible for 9/11 and other terrorist attacks?" Response: "The cultural left...put radical Islam in the position where it could conduct these attacks...Carter agreed to pull the Persian rug out from under the Shah..." (No mention of the fact that the United States engineered the rise of the Shah, and of course Carter did not give the revolutionaries "permission" to overthrow the Shah.)
Straw Opponent:Dinesh D'Souza: "Our decadent and depraved society repulses the fundamentalists..." and associates this with "Blue America." (Everyone who is against depravity raise your hand!)
Straw Man: (Raising an argument that's easy to argue against, to distract from the real argument.) Radio personality Mancow discusses a radio contest where a person died from being encouraged to drink an excessive amount of water. Host responds: "What about free speech?"
Red Herring: (Discussing a topic that is not really the topic.)D'Souza again: "Show them the real America..." [Host responds] "Conservative America!" Implicit is the idea that America is really conservative, if the media wouldn't give so much attention to the rest of us.
False dichotomy: You are presented with two alternatives, such as owls or jobs, the economy or the environment, when there are really more than two alternatives. Cavuto: "The people who are trying to bring down Wal-Mart...Are they also against capitalism?" "With Democrats trying to do everything they can to make the president powerless...Will Wall Street suffer?" "2008 will be terrible for the market...with the Democrat's anti-business agenda."
Appeal to Fear (We all know that one.)"A credible threat of terrorism and barely a mention in the mainstream media..." (Fox, of course, distinguishes itself from the other media.)Crawl: "Is Wall Street Worried America Is Going Soft on Terror?" Cavuto: "The biggest tax hike in history--will Bush sign on?" (Talking about raising the cap on social security wages--not a hike at all to anyone making under ~$90,000)
UPDATE: WOndered all morning about the crawl that said Hillary Clinton was in (sic) Ohio...her first visit to the Buckeye State in three years. Of course, she's in Iowa. Are they that stupid?
I know it's hard, but it's a cold weekend in the north. Perhaps some other click-addicts will find some of the not-so-subtle tricks that media like FOX use, so that we can enlighten poor Cliff Claven.