Sunday, November 23, 2014

Logical Fallacies in Fox News

While looking for something to write my post about, I remembered Mrs. Young's comment about how all we had to do was watch Fox News for abut a minute. So, I looked up 'ridiculous fox news arguments' and found one about women voting during the midterms. 

At one point in the report, one host had something potentially ignorant to say about women who vote: "Married women vote republican, single women vote heavily for democrats." This is an example of hasty generalization, which is defined as "reaching an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence". While that statement could be generally true, its not such a definitive statement as the hosts are making it sound.They also kept talking about the universal "woman", not acknowledging how hard it is to generalize us all as a whole since everyone is different. 

They then continued with another logical fallacy, slippery slope. Slippery slope is "where a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument". Co-host Greg Gutfeld said "...with age comes wisdom" and the "older you get, the more conservative you get." Another quickly followed that with "And get a brain." 

I suppose this is a very subjective topic, since my own opinions and political views can easily get in the way. But objectively, logical fallacies can effortlessly find their way into any political argument/discussion. 

1 comment:

  1. I agree with you, the quotes were very good when you connected them with logical fallacies. I think this was a good topic, nice work!

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