Last week I posed the question, "How often does media intentionally use fallacies and informal logic in their favor?" Although no one I know sits in front of their television, counting the use of fallacies, I found myself doing it for the two popular satirical news shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. After averaging the tally marks, I found that each show uses an average of 23 techniques per night. (This was done over the course of this past week.) Both hosts go through about 10 soundbites a night, and they both use selective wording and rhetorical questions in almost every interview, leaving the interviewee with little option but to awkwardly laugh and avoid the question. There was even an episode of Colbert where his original question was removed, and the producers edited in him asking something completely different. (It was just for laughs and made purposefully obvious, but still a little manipulative).
As for the rest of the media, aka "the real" media I looked for some statistics of how often fallacies are used, but with no luck. The closest I could find was Mediahell, unfortunately only documents fallacies in the British media. It was still a great reference, though. I recommend checking it out.
Ok, so this week was still heavily based on identifying fallacies, much like last week. It opened with an episode of The Awful Truth, where Moore attempts to run a ficus against candidates for Senate. In the episode, Moore uses his normal techniques to persuade the audience in his favor, but he ends up just getting really obnoxious. He also made claims that candidates were running unopposed, when he never counted an incumbant as opposition.
We also started taking a look at Michael Moore's film Bowling For Columbine and looked at the common techniques of manipulative logic used by Moore. One clip in particular that stuck out for me was Moore's interview with James Nichols, brother of one of the conspirators involved in the Oklahoma City Bombing. During the interview, it only shows Michael ask one or two questions, but the interview is good ten minutes. It was a good example of both the Phantom Question and Editing for Sound Bites. Moore didn't show the question that prompted Nichols' response, and he only used segments of the entire interview, edited together to make Nichol's sound crazy.
Another part of of the segment that stuck out was the clip when James took Michael into his room. Conveniently, the cameras weren't allowed in. Moore made it appear as though Nichols had put the gun to his own head at this point, yet it never appears on camera. One thing I found interesting was, after doing a bit of research, I learned that Nichols actually filed a lawsuit against Moore. Ultimately, he lost, but his argument was that Bowling For Columbine made him look like he had part in the Oklahoma City Bombing. The court ruled in favor of Moore because, even though they were delivered in a misleading manor, all the statements in the film about Nichols were "factually and substantially true."
This got me thinking. Obviously fallacies cause plenty of civil lawsuits (just look at Borat). I began to wonder how often cases like these appear in court. Also, how often does the Plantiff prevail over the Manipulator? After all, our Constitution protects the freedom of speech.
Sources:
Associated Press. "Court quashes lawsuit against filmmaker Moore." CBC News. 20 Feb. 2007. Web. 27 Sept. 2009.
Bowling For Columbine Poster. Photograph. Abnoxio. Web. .
Dean, Brian. Media Hell. Web.
