[h=2]Dissecting an ANTZ News Article[/h] Filed under: Miscellaneous Vaping News 3 Comments
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... (Click here to read the rest of my article.)
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... (Click here to read the rest of my article.)
