how radlibs lie: "Getting Duped: How the Liberal Media Messes with Your
Mind?"
mm
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=getting-duped
Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind
Statements made in the media can surreptitiously plant distortions in the
minds of millions. Learning to recognize two
commonly used fallacies can help you separate fact from fiction
By Yvonne Raley and Robert Talisse
In 2003 nearly half of all Americans falsely assumed that the U.S.
government had found solid evidence for a link
between Iraq and al Qaeda. What is more, almost a quarter of us believed
that investigators had all but confirmed the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a 2003
re****t by the University of Maryland's Program on
International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, a polling and
market research firm. How did the true situation in
Iraq become so grossly distorted in American minds?
Many people have attributed such misconceptions to a politically motivated
disinformation campaign to engender sup****t
for the armed struggle in Iraq. We do not think the deceptions were
premeditated, however. Instead they are most likely
the result of common types of reasoning errors, which appear frequently in
discussions in the news media and which can
easily fool an unsuspecting public.
News shows often have an implicit bias that may motivate the ****trayal of
facts and opinions in misleading ways, even if
the information presented is largely accurate. Nevertheless, by becoming
familiar with how spokespeople can create false
impressions, media consumers can learn to ignore certain claims and
thereby avoid getting duped. We have detected two
general types of fallacies-one of them well known and the other newly
identified-that have permeated discussion of the
Iraq War and that are generally ubiquitous in political debates and other
discourse.
Spinning Straw into Fool's Gold
One common method of spinning information is the so-called straw man
argument. In this tactic, a person summarizes the
opposition's position inaccurately so as to weaken it and then refutes
that inaccurate rendition. In a November 2005
speech, for example, President George W. Bush responded to questions about
pulling troops out of Iraq by saying, "We've
heard some people say, pull them out right now. That's a huge mistake.
It'd be a terrible mistake. It sends a bad
message to our troops, and it sends a bad message to our enemy, and it
sends a bad message to the Iraqis." The statement
that unnamed "people" are advocating a troop withdrawal from Iraq "right
now" is a straw man, because it exaggerates the
opposing viewpoint. Not even the most stalwart Bush adversaries backed an
immediate troop withdrawal. Most proposed that
the soldiers be sent home over several months, a more reasonable and
persuasive plan that Bush undercut with his straw
man.
The straw man is used in countless other contexts as well. In his
acceptance speech at the 1996 Democratic Convention,
for instance, Bill Clinton opined: ". with all respect [to Bob Dole], we
do not need to build a bridge to the past. We
need to build a bridge to the future." Dole did discuss restoring the
values of an earlier America, but Clinton falsely
implied that Dole was only looking backward (whereas Clinton was looking
forward). People may use a straw man to
discredit theories to which they do not subscribe. Characterizing
evolution, for example, as "all random chance" is a
straw man argument; it misrepresents a complex theory that only partly
rests on the randomness of mutations that may
lead to better chances of survival.
Recently, in a 2006 paper co-authored with Scott F. Aikin, one of us
(Talisse) do***ented a twist on the straw man
tactic. In what Talisse dubs a weak man argument, a person sets up the
opposition's weakest (or one of its weakest)
arguments or proponents for attack, as opposed to misstating a rival's
position as the straw man argument does. In a
July 2007 edition of Talking Points, Bill O'Reilly took on a claim by the
New York Times that we had lost the war in
Iraq by saying that "the New York Times declared defeat in Iraq Sunday on
its editorial page, and there's no question
the antiwar movement has momentum." (The editorial actually said that
"some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with
the idea of American defeat," but let us assume that O'Reilly's
characterization was correct.)
O'Reilly then offered a weak man explanation for the pur****ted defeat:
"The truth is the Iraqi government and many of
its citizens are simply not doing enough to defeat the terrorists and
corruption. The U.S.A. can't control that country.
No nation could.... Unfortunately, the Iraqi failure to help themselves
has come true." Although Iraq's failure to aid
in fighting terrorism and corruption could be why we are losing the war,
the troubles in Iraq could also stem from a
host of logistical reasons, some of which may shed a negative light on the
current administration. O'Reilly, however,
kept any discussion of these reasons offstage, suppressing the various
other possible-and possibly more likely-reasons
for "defeat" in Iraq. Meanwhile his claims that the "U.S.A. can't control
that country" and that "no nation could"
deflected blame from the U.S. government.
Weak man arguments are pervasive. In a 2005 editorial in Denver's Rocky
Mountain News, conservative writer and activist
David Horowitz picked on ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill, formerly
at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose
views he described as "hateful and ignorant." Horowitz then went on to
claim that Churchill's radical "hate America"
convictions "represent" those of a "substantial segment of the academic
community." Thus, he used the example of
Churchill (the weak man) to argue that "tenured radicals" have made
universities into leftist political institutions and
subverted the academic enterprise, thereby failing to acknowledge the
presence of more highly regarded and politically
mainstream scholars in academia.
Trolling for Truth
Weak man tactics are harder to detect than those of the straw man variety.
Because straw man arguments are closely
related to an opponent's true position, a clever listener might be able to
spot the truth amid the hyperbole,
understatement or other corrupted version of that view. A weak man
argument, however, is more opaque because it contains
a grain of truth and often bears little similarity to the stronger
arguments that should also be presented. Therefore, a
listener has to know a lot more about the situation to imagine the
information that a speaker or writer has cleverly
disregarded.
Nevertheless, an astute consumer of the news can catch many straw man and
weak man fallacies by knowing how they work.
Another strategy is to always consider a speaker's or writer's motivation
or agenda and be especially alert for skewed
statements of fact in editorials, television opinion shows, and the like.
It is also wise to obtain news from more
balanced news sources. An alternative approach is to try to construct, in
your own mind, the best argument against what
you have heard before accepting it as true. Or simply ask yourself: Why
should I not believe this?
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