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Dissecting an ANTZ News Article
Filed under: Miscellaneous Vaping News Leave a comment
September 8, 2013
I picked a shark on purpose.
Lets take a typical, fear-peddling pro-ANTZ, anti-E-cigarette news story and take it apart piece by piece, just for kicks. I wonder if we can reach 20 logical fallacies and/or journalistic manipulation techniques in one short e-zine article. The article Ive chosen for this little experiment is called Doctors caution use of e-cigarettes, saying vaping is worse than smoking the real thing written for theindychannel.com by Linda Hurtado:
TAMPA, Fla. Touted as a safer alternative to traditional smoking, electronic cigarettes are supposed to give smokers their nicotine fix without the cancer-causing side effects of tobacco. [Terms such as "Touted as a..." and "Supposed to..." are more often than not used by news journalists to highlight the opposite scenario. Consider the sentence "The Toyota Prius is touted as an environmentally friendly automobile which is supposed to cut down on air pollution." If you saw this at the opening to a news article, you'd probably assume that the rest of the article was going to present something negative about the environmental effects of Priuses.]
But some have serious concerns that the battery-operated vaping devices may actually pose more dangers to users. [This is a classic fallacy of insufficient statistics, bandwagon argument, and/or hasty induction. "Some" is a purposefully vague word. Actually, because of Americans' tendency to root for the "underdog" in any contest... the word "some" can actually convince people instantaneously that those "some" must be right in the face of innumerable opposite-position-holders. The rational response to a vague statement like this is to immediately ask, "Who?"]
Gwynne Chesher lives in Florida, where smoking in most public places was banned more than eight years ago. Shes been smoking for more than 40 years. [The author is really reaching to do some cherry picking here. Essentially, we're going to use a single example in order to prove statements that concern the entire population. This method is typically used to appeal to the reader's emotions, in that a face and a name make the whole story seem more personal.]
In 1965, everybody smoked, it was an acceptable thing to do back then, said Chesher. At her worst, Chesher was puffing a pack a day and eventually, she tried to stop. [Everybody smoked? Just like everybody voted for Kennedy and everybody became a hippie, right? Here, the author is appealing to the popularity of smoking in order to suggest a very difficult to swallow, and even more difficult to prove proposition: We now now that smoking is unhealthy, but they didn't know that back in 1965 (untrue... they knew smoking was unhealthy, they just didn't know the specifics, yet.) therefore, nobody knows that vaping is unhealthy now, but they will in the future. This assumes too much. Firstly, it assumes that it has already been proven that vaping is unhealthy, when in fact the opposite claim is closer to being true. This is a textbook fallacy of presupposition.]
I tried the gum. It gave me a stomachache, she said. Tried the patch. It made my heart beat fast and scared me. So when her son recently suggested yet something else, Chesher signed up. You just inhale like a cigarette, said Chesher, as she explained how to use an e-cigarette. It looks like smoke, but its water vapor. [this part of the article slyly implies that any form of smoking cessation besides the "cold turkey" method is inherently dangerous in one way or another. The gum made her sick, the patch raised her pulse to dangerous levels, etc. Finally, the author adds a common misunderstanding about E-cigarettes. It is not, in fact, water vapor. It is vaporized VG and PG, which is not water. This might seem like splitting hairs, but if you're going to make scientific claims, you ought to be as precise as possible, agreed?]
E-cigarettes, what some call vaping, are battery operated. They have the look and feel of a traditional cigarette, without the smell, the smoke and the harmful side effects, say its supporters. I was really impressed, said Chesher. Then her doctor weighed in. He was like No way! You cant use those! she said. [OK. One of those often overlooked logical fallacies is actually one of the simplest... and that is the truth value of a statement. Most fallacies deal with the form of an argument, but that argument is just as fallacious if it bases it's claim on faulty information. In this particular case, not all E-cigarettes "look like" traditional cigarettes. It is true that the smell of burning tobacco is not present in E-cigs, but the sentence suggests that this is only an unproven statement by "supporters." It is also true, regardless of what spin is being placed on misconstrued and misquoted reports by other news/media outlets, that E-cigs don't deliver the harmful side effects of traditional cigarettes. There is so much evidence of this, that I refuse to reference any of it. I also refuse to reference evidence of gravity when I write about something falling off of a table and breaking. And next, although it is technically neither logically licit nor illicit, the subject's doctor was "like, totally for sure no, and I was like no way, and he was like I know right? and like his face was all serious and, like, for real and stuff..." In other words,... (Click here to read the rest of my article.)
Dissecting an ANTZ News Article
Filed under: Miscellaneous Vaping News Leave a comment
September 8, 2013
I picked a shark on purpose.
Lets take a typical, fear-peddling pro-ANTZ, anti-E-cigarette news story and take it apart piece by piece, just for kicks. I wonder if we can reach 20 logical fallacies and/or journalistic manipulation techniques in one short e-zine article. The article Ive chosen for this little experiment is called Doctors caution use of e-cigarettes, saying vaping is worse than smoking the real thing written for theindychannel.com by Linda Hurtado:
TAMPA, Fla. Touted as a safer alternative to traditional smoking, electronic cigarettes are supposed to give smokers their nicotine fix without the cancer-causing side effects of tobacco. [Terms such as "Touted as a..." and "Supposed to..." are more often than not used by news journalists to highlight the opposite scenario. Consider the sentence "The Toyota Prius is touted as an environmentally friendly automobile which is supposed to cut down on air pollution." If you saw this at the opening to a news article, you'd probably assume that the rest of the article was going to present something negative about the environmental effects of Priuses.]
But some have serious concerns that the battery-operated vaping devices may actually pose more dangers to users. [This is a classic fallacy of insufficient statistics, bandwagon argument, and/or hasty induction. "Some" is a purposefully vague word. Actually, because of Americans' tendency to root for the "underdog" in any contest... the word "some" can actually convince people instantaneously that those "some" must be right in the face of innumerable opposite-position-holders. The rational response to a vague statement like this is to immediately ask, "Who?"]
Gwynne Chesher lives in Florida, where smoking in most public places was banned more than eight years ago. Shes been smoking for more than 40 years. [The author is really reaching to do some cherry picking here. Essentially, we're going to use a single example in order to prove statements that concern the entire population. This method is typically used to appeal to the reader's emotions, in that a face and a name make the whole story seem more personal.]
In 1965, everybody smoked, it was an acceptable thing to do back then, said Chesher. At her worst, Chesher was puffing a pack a day and eventually, she tried to stop. [Everybody smoked? Just like everybody voted for Kennedy and everybody became a hippie, right? Here, the author is appealing to the popularity of smoking in order to suggest a very difficult to swallow, and even more difficult to prove proposition: We now now that smoking is unhealthy, but they didn't know that back in 1965 (untrue... they knew smoking was unhealthy, they just didn't know the specifics, yet.) therefore, nobody knows that vaping is unhealthy now, but they will in the future. This assumes too much. Firstly, it assumes that it has already been proven that vaping is unhealthy, when in fact the opposite claim is closer to being true. This is a textbook fallacy of presupposition.]
I tried the gum. It gave me a stomachache, she said. Tried the patch. It made my heart beat fast and scared me. So when her son recently suggested yet something else, Chesher signed up. You just inhale like a cigarette, said Chesher, as she explained how to use an e-cigarette. It looks like smoke, but its water vapor. [this part of the article slyly implies that any form of smoking cessation besides the "cold turkey" method is inherently dangerous in one way or another. The gum made her sick, the patch raised her pulse to dangerous levels, etc. Finally, the author adds a common misunderstanding about E-cigarettes. It is not, in fact, water vapor. It is vaporized VG and PG, which is not water. This might seem like splitting hairs, but if you're going to make scientific claims, you ought to be as precise as possible, agreed?]
E-cigarettes, what some call vaping, are battery operated. They have the look and feel of a traditional cigarette, without the smell, the smoke and the harmful side effects, say its supporters. I was really impressed, said Chesher. Then her doctor weighed in. He was like No way! You cant use those! she said. [OK. One of those often overlooked logical fallacies is actually one of the simplest... and that is the truth value of a statement. Most fallacies deal with the form of an argument, but that argument is just as fallacious if it bases it's claim on faulty information. In this particular case, not all E-cigarettes "look like" traditional cigarettes. It is true that the smell of burning tobacco is not present in E-cigs, but the sentence suggests that this is only an unproven statement by "supporters." It is also true, regardless of what spin is being placed on misconstrued and misquoted reports by other news/media outlets, that E-cigs don't deliver the harmful side effects of traditional cigarettes. There is so much evidence of this, that I refuse to reference any of it. I also refuse to reference evidence of gravity when I write about something falling off of a table and breaking. And next, although it is technically neither logically licit nor illicit, the subject's doctor was "like, totally for sure no, and I was like no way, and he was like I know right? and like his face was all serious and, like, for real and stuff..." In other words,... (Click here to read the rest of my article.)
