A Great Red Herring

Here is an excellent example of a Red Herring from the folks at Family Guy.

Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

A Loaded Question occurs when someone asks a question that contains a number of unspoken assumptions. The tricky part is that it is very difficult to respond to that question without tacitly accepting the assumptions that are buried in that question. The most famous example is, "When did you stop beating your wife?" One cannot really respond to this question without accidentally admitting that one has a history of spousal abuse. Examples like this can be quite amusing, but we should never forget that people have often exploited these fallacies for their own gain.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is an electoral tactic known as Push Polling. The way it works is that in a contested election, one side will employ people to call up likely voters in the guise of conducting an electoral poll. These "pollsters" will then ask a series of Loaded Question in the guise of collecting polling data. These questions will often imply that the candidate being asked about is guilty of some scandal with the hope that the people who are being asked these questions will assume that the scandal must be real, otherwise why would the "pollster" be asking about it?

Push Polls were a favorite electoral dirty trick of George W. Bush, and he employed them several times both when running for Governor of Texas as well as when he ran for President. The most famous and well-documented instance of this was during the 2000 Republican Primary in South Carolina. This primary came early in the season, and up to this point John McCain had been making all the headlines and winning the few primaries and caucuses that had been held up to that point. Recognizing that his campaign was in trouble, George W. Bush (or more accurately his campaign advisors) decided to use a push polling technique, and began calling likely voters in South Carolina under the guise of conducting a poll. These voters were asked a number of questions including, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

This is a great example of a Loaded Question. The question clearly implies that McCain has fathered an illegitimate black child, but it doesn't actually accuse him of doing that. It merely suggests it. This suggestion is further bolstered by images such as the one at the top of this post, which show the McCain family with, apparently, a black member. The individual is, in fact, McCain's adopted daughter Bridget, and the story of her adoption is actually quite touching, and reflects well on McCain and his family.

However, at the time, these smears, taking the form of loaded questions delivered by push poll were strong enough to derail the McCain campaign (which says something about the values of the primary voters in South Carolina), and he went on to lose the primary to George W. Bush who was subsequently elected president. 

I do not relate this story to criticize Bush or to praise McCain, but instead to show why it is so important to study and think about these fallacies. We study these fallacies because they are out there everywhere, and these fallacies are out there everywhere because they work. If we don't work hard to recognize them and call them out when we see them, we allow them to work and we allow others to be deceived. And this isn't good for anybody.

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