Apparently Young Black Men Want to be Thugs (or maybe Police)

Eduction is when one takes a quotation out of its original context. The video that follows is an excellent, though disturbing example of this. This video is particularly helpful in that it shows the eduction, and then shows the original footage that was edited to make the subject appear to say something very different from what he actually said:

In case it wasn't obvious, the news station edited the comments of that young boy to make it appear as if he was intending to pursue a life of crime. In effect, the news station wanted to present this African-American male as a "thug-in-training." However, if we look at the raw video footage of the interview, we can see that this young boy wants to be the exact opposite of a "thug-in-training." Instead, he wants to join the police! So, through selective editing, this station made a young man appear to say exactly the opposite of what he did. The question of why a station would do this is an exercise left up to the reader.

The Appeal to Emotion to End All Appeals to Emotion

The Appeal to Pity is a type of appeal to emotion in which one attempts to play on someone's sympathy or empathy to get that person to support a conclusion. The idea is that you make your audience feel pity for some subject, and then you can get them to support the policies that you claim will help that subject. When I teach this topic in my classes, some student invariably raises his or her own hand to offer the following commercial as an example of an Appeal to Pity. Without further ado, here it is

Now I am a sucker for dogs, so I am clearly the target of this video. It is almost impossible for me to avoid tearing up when I see dogs suffering (particularly that poor dog whose back legs don't seem to work). Thus, even though I can recognize this video for the fallacious argument that it is, it is still remarkably effective. And this is the major reason these fallacies continue to exist and proliferate. They work, even on people who know that they are being manipulated. I really need to donate to the local SPCA.

Does Nicholas Cage cause people to drown in their swimming pools?

A great new website, Spurious Correlations, has just appeared on my radar, and it fantastically illustrates the Post Hoc fallacy. The website takes data sets, and then hunts through the web to find data sets that correlate with the initial data and then presnts it in the form of a chart. The headline for the post comes from this chart:



As this chart nicely shows, there is a correlation between Nicholas Cage films and drowning deaths in swimming pools. There is clearly no causal relation that I can think of here (though Cage has certainly appeared in some dire films recently), but there is a clear and obvious correlation. This entire website does a great job of illustrating the mantra that "correlation does not equal causation." I encourage everyone to take a look at the site because many of the correlations are interesting and quite humorous.

Jingoism in the US Media

The last of the five filters that make up Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media is Anti-Communism, referring to the the uncritical support given to the US and a condemnation of major US adversaries Communist Russia and China. That the final filter was described this way is no surprise given that Chomsky and Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent during the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalism in China, labeling the last filter "Anti-Communism" isn't really appropriate. Chomsky and Herman now suggest that the fifth filter manifests as fear of an enemy, today this is most obviously the War on Terror, but I would suggest that Jingoism is a better label. Jingoism is a kind of unthinking hyper-patriotism in which one believes that everything one's own country and its allies do is moral and justified while any action committed by one's enemies (even if it is the exact same action as one performed by one's own country) is presumptively evil and immoral. 

We can see some excellent examples of Jingoism in the way the US Media and many government officials have responded to the Russian aggression towards Ukraine. The most obvious example, discussed by many commentators, are comments US Secretary of State John Kerry made on Face the Nation. In a conversation with host Bob Schieffer he remarked, "You just don't in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext." As almost everybody immediately noted, this is a remarkable statement coming from Sec. Kerry who, as a Senator, voted in favor of the US Invasion of Iraq and, according to Glenn Greenwald, argued in favor of the invasion because, "“Saddam Hussein [is] sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” and there is “little doubt that Saddam Hussein wants to retain his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.” We now know these claims to have been a "completely trumped up pretext."

Now it is one thing for the US Government to make such patently hypocritical claims, but what about the Media? As Greenwald notes, Schieffer allowed Kerry to make these comments without challenge:

The supremely sycophantic Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer – as he demanded to know how Russia would be punished – never once bothered Kerry (or his other Iraq-war-advocating guests, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius) by asking about any of that unpleasantness (is it hard at all for you to sermonize against invasions of sovereign countries given, you know, how often you yourself support them?)

In addition, Greenwald provides examples of other US journalists who make similar claims to those of Sec. Kerry:

The vast bulk of the commentary issuing from American commentators about the Russian military action in Ukraine involves condemning exactly that which they routinely advocate and which the U.S. itself routinely does. So suffocating is the resulting stench that those who played leading roles in selling the public the attack on Iraq and who are still unrepentant about it, such as David “Axis of Evil/The Right Man” Frum, have actually become the leading media voices condemning Russia on the ground that it is wrong to invade sovereign countries; Frum thus has no trouble saying things like this with an apparently straight face: “If Russia acts the outlaw nation, can it be expected to be treated as anything but an outlaw?”

In each of these cases we can see clear example of the Jingoism of the US Media. If the US does it it is good and just; if someone else does it it is evil and wrong. As Eugene Robinson nicely put it:

Is it just me, or does the rhetoric about the crisis in Ukraine sound as if all of Washington is suffering from amnesia? We’re supposed to be shocked — shocked! — that a great military power would cook up a pretext to invade a smaller, weaker nation? I’m sorry, but has everyone forgotten the unfortunate events in Iraq a few years ago?

A Christmas Present..or two..or ten.

The following video is a very nice compilation from the folks at the Conan O'Brian show that reveals some important truths about the way local media functions:

As one can see from the clip, it is clear that many local and national news anchors are all literally reading from the same script. As this excellent article from Jeremy Barr at Poynter shows, many local news stations are simply buying or using pre-packed content from other sources. This pre-packaged content from various wire-services or public relations firms is often just read word-for-word by the anchors, a process known in the business as "ripping and reading." This is another excellent example illustrating Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media. In this case, this nicely illustrates the third filter, which is the fact that media outlets rely on a limited range of sources in crafting their news content. The fact that so many news stations are relying on exactly the same source provides as clear an example of this as one could imagine.

h/t to the AV Club

"Journalist" Chuck Todd: Reporting Ain't My Job

In a previous post I talked about how the media is actively misinforming its viewer about the recent CBO report discussing the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on the labor market. On person I singled out as particularly guilty was  Chuck Todd who is NBC's Chief White House Correspondent and the host of MSNBC's The Daily Rundown. The following video clip provides a very revealing insight into Todd's understanding of his job, and it helps explain why people who watch him get stupider.

Edit: I seem to be having problems with the video embed. Here is a link to the original article with the video. Go watch the video and then read the rest of what I have to say.

I would ask Todd why he thinks Republicans have been able to "successfully message" lies about the ACA. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that "journalists" like Chuck Todd are failing to accurately report what the law says, and are instead just repeating Republican lies and distortions. It seems to me that, as a journalist, if you report on something someone says, you also have an obligation to fact check those claims to ensure that they are true. Simply reporting on what other people say isn't journalism. It's stenography, and I don't need Chuck Todd to tell me what Republicans are saying. I can just go to their webpages or C-Span to get that information for myself. The true function of journalism is to serve as a check on the power of governments. If people like Chuck Todd just report in a he-said/she-said manner without providing the proper context and correct information, they really aren't doing their jobs. More evidence that watching the Mainstream Media makes you stupider.

h/t to Tom Kludt of TPM

The Media Makes you Stupider

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just released a report in which they predict what effect current laws and tax policies will have on the US economy over the next ten years. For those who don't know, the CBO was created by Congress in 1974 to provide objective, nonpartisan analyses of the economic effects of laws and taxes in order to help Congress determine the actual economic impacts of that legislation. As part of its report, the CBO has made some predictions about how the Affordable Care Act (ACA, informally known as Obamacare) will effect the labor market in the US. One of their main conclusions is the following:

CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

What this means is that because of the healthcare guarantees provided by the ACA, many people who are working solely to obtain health benefits will stop working because they can now get healthcare on one of the state-run exchanges. This will have the effect of freeing up these jobs for other workers who are looking for employment. As a result, according to the CBO, the ACA will result in the equivalent of about 2-2.5 million workers leaving the labor market. As an illustration, here is ZGare commenting on an article about this in the Washington Post:

At 64, I am about to retire, but my wife who is 55 with a pre-existing condition (diverticulitus 15 years ago) would have had to keep working for health insurance to protect against catastrophic illness wiping out our life savings. But with ACA, she can retire in a couple of years instead of 10 years and travel with me.

So, because of the ACA, ZGare's wife will retire earlier than she would have without the ACA. The job she was performing will still exist, but because she isn't doing it, there will now be a vacancy for a new employee (assuming the employer doesn't decide to reduce its workforce through attrition for some other reason).

So, now that we are clear about what the CBO actually said in its report (and if you don't believe me, just go read it). Let's take a look at how many people in the Media reported on this report. A recurring theme will be that if you get your information from these media outlets you will actually be misinformed about what the CBO actually said. In effect, after watching these programs you will have less understanding about the world, and you will, in fact, be a little stupider.

First up is Fox News. Here is a headline followed by the first paragraph from their website:

ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.3 million US jobs, report says

The long-term effect of ObamaCare on the U.S. economy was rewritten Tuesday with the Congressional Budget Office issuing a revised projection that nearly 2.5 million workers could opt out of full-time jobs over the next 10 years -- allowing employers to wipe 2.3 million full-time jobs off the books.

Again, the report does not say that the jobs will be lost, but that the equivalent of 2.3 million people might choose to retire, work less, or quit their current job to start up a new business. These kind of lies and deception are par for the course at Fox News, but they weren't the only one's guilty of misrepresenting the report. Here's a tweet from Luke Russert of NBC:

New report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is an election year killer for Affordable Care Act/Obamacare
— Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) February 4, 2014

And here is a tweet from Chuck Todd, also of NBC:

CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on health care. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) February 4, 2014

In both these cases, we have individuals who claim to be journalists actively misrepresenting the content of the CBO report to their followers. This is a clear example of those in the Mainstream Media who call themselves journalists actually misinforming their audience about a subject of great importance. And this is very strong evidence that getting information from the Mainstream Media actually makes you stupider.

h/t to Dylan Scott of TPM