Why don't they want you to read the fine print?

Accent or Accentuation is when one changes the meaning of a statement by emphasizing or deemphasizing certain components of that statement. In the image below we see one of the classic uses of accent by advertisers. In each of these images from a TV commercial you can see the very fine print that flashes up at the end of the ad. The advertisers don't want you to see this information, but they are legally required to show it, so the solution is to flash it on the screen in fine print for half a second. Personally, I think advertising laws should be changed so that advertisers are required to present all information in the same font. But, given the influence advertisers and corporations have on the government, such a change seems unlikely. The takeaway: don't believe anything you see in an ad.

h/t Alexius08 at Cracked.com

Really, Fox News makes you dumber.

In my critical thinking courses I like to make the claim that watching or consuming Mainstream Media, particularly outlets like Fox News makes individuals dumber and more misinformed. The line usually gets a laugh or two, and-for those with a more liberal bent-the sentiment seems obviously true. However, as critical thinkers we must be careful about believing things because they fit with our own biases or preconceptions. We are interested in the truth and getting it right, regardless of how that might make us feel or hurt our feelings. So, is it true that watching Fox News makes you dumber?

Fortunately, I am by no means the first to articulate such a question, and a fair degree of research has been performed on exactly this question, looking to answer it concerning a variety of issues of great public importance. Chris Mooney at Alternet has a great roundup of the research, and much of the following discussion is taken from his article.

Mooney looks at 7 studies that support the claim that viewers of Fox News are more misinformed about the world than people who get their news from non-Fox sources. All of these studies basically took the form of interviews with with individuals, and then correlated the beliefs of those individuals with their media consumption habits. Every single one of these studies showed that people who get the majority of their information from Fox News were significantly more likely to believe things that are not true about the world.

I want to focus in one one of the studies looked at by Mooney. This study, published at the end of 2010 was conducted by PIPA, and looked at misinformation among voters during the 2010 midterm elections. Summarizing the results of the study to Mooney, one of the authors drew the following conclusion:

“With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA’s director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Similar results were born out by other studies consulted by Mooney, and collectively these make clear that consuming too much Fox News leads to a greater degree of misinformation among those viewers, and thus among the electorate generally. This is a significant problem and a real threat to democracy, but one without a clear solution.

Those "Black Americans" sure look pretty white

The above image comes from this article on the Intercept, and it illustrates the top donors to a SuperPac calling itself "Black Americans for a Better Future."  This is an excellent example of a Front Group. As the website SourceWatch defines it, "A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other party or interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned." In this case, we have a group of wealthy, white, Republican donors who are trying to engage in some political outreach to African-American voters. The problem is that they present themselves as being a group of like-minded black citizens (it's right there in the title). The group does have an African-American spokesman by the name of Raynard Jackson, but he is just that, a spokesman. He is not donating to the group (or if he is,it is less than $250), he is not setting the agenda for the group, he is just being paid by these rich white guys to make it appear that large numbers of concerned black citizens support Republican policies. This is, unfortunately, all too common in American politics, but it is not so often that one sees such an egregious example.

A Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which change in one direction is assumed to lead to further disastrous change in the same direction. Depending on how extreme the slope gets, some of these can be quite humorous. Case in point is a series of ads from DirectTV in which the basic narrative of the ad is a series of slippery slopes describing all the horrible consequences that will follow if one doesn't purchase DirectTV. While these are intentionally absurd, they are still a good model of the kind of flawed reasoning exhibited by this fallacy.

A funny Amphiboly

Here is another great example of Amphiboly or Amphibology, which is when one produces statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways due to ambiguous grammar.

In this case, it would appear that one would need to have all four of the conditions described above in order to use the restroom. While I understand the importance of reserving special spaces for those in need, I am not sure how many elderly children are actually served by this.

George Carlin on Critical Thinking

This clip from (I think) a fairly late George Carlin special serves as an excellent introduction to the topic of critical thinking, and I largely agree with Carlin's analysis of the importance and necessity of developing critical thinking skills. without them we are at the mercy of powerful and well-connected groups and individuals who are committed to acquiring more for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

One of the best George Carlin routines ever. Miss ya, George!
Posted by Brandon Weber on Friday, March 27, 2015

Here is a link to the source of the video.

Quote, interrupted

As I tell my classes, Eduction is when one takes a quote out of its original context to change the meaning. This occurs in many different contexts, but one of the most well-known and obvious is when quotations are pulled from a review and then used in marketing. This happens in all domains, but is most obvious in the case of films and DVD's. I came across an excellent example of this while perusing one of my favorite pop culture websites (got to keep up with the kids and stay relevant!) the AV Club. One of their writers, A.A. Dowd, recently penned an open letter to media company Mongrel Media, calling them out for misquoting one of his reviews for a blurb on the back of the DVD release of the film Nailed (Accidental Love in the US).  First, here is the blurb on the back of the DVD:

A comedic masterstroke.

This is fairly high praise, and if one is familiar with this reviewer, this recommendation would be a good reason to pick up the film. However, if we look back at Dowd's original C- review, we find that this "praise" is not as high as it might initially appear:

To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke. [Emphasis added]

As we can see,  Mongrel Media just lopped off the beginning of the sentence to completely change the original meaning of the quotation. This is a textbook example of eduction, and it occurs much more frequently than you might think.