[tracygray]

What is a fallacy in a newspaper editorial ?

[RickJ]

Remember your 101 and you can easily answer this one. A fallacy is a fallacy no matter where it appears. Are you looking for a reminder of what a fallacy is... or are you looking for an example of a fallacy from an editorial?

[shygrneyzs]

An example of a fallacy in a newspaper editorial is something like this:

Item: letter to ed. Already the argument over how to replace the World Trade Center towers has begun. To replicate them is economically unsound, strategically foolhardy and, frankly insulting to the dead, as if, by putting the buildings back, we can make things as they were. Incorrectly identified as a slippery slope argument. Here the arguer gives several reasons for not rebuilding the WTC, but does not assert without reasons that if we do rebuild the WTC a chain of horrible events will be set in motion.

Item: an editorial on how good it is of the New York Times to devote a full page every day to those who lost their lives on September 11th. The editorial ends with As the playwright Arthur Miller once wrote memorably in a different context, “Attention must be paid.” So it must. Incorrectly identified as an irrelevant appeal to authority. The author was not trying to establish the truth of a controversial or questionable claim by appealing to an authority on the matter. (It is understandable that the student would not recognize that the author has found something resonant in Miller's lines for Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and the tribute being paid by the NYT to the human beings who had this terrible thing happen to them.

Item: letter to ed. In plain English, would you rather die or kill? This was correctly identified as a false dilemma and a loaded question.

Item: letter to ed. Now that we have more police protection at our airport, water supplies and sewage plants to protect us from terrorists, we have ended up with less protection in our cities. So now if a small group of terrorists decide that a local mall would be a good target, there are fewer police officers available to protect us. The solution to this is simple! Allow Californians to carry a weapon. (The argument is that Californians should be allowed to carry weapons because the police can't protect us as we go about our daily lives. They can't protect us because they have been reassigned to airports, water supplies and sewage plants to protect those places against terrorists.) Incorrectly identified as evading the issue and by another student as a hasty conclusion. The argument is based on a false dilemma and is a non sequitur. The arguer assumes that the police protect either the places mentioned or they protect us in the cities, but not both. But even if it were true that the police are spread too thin to protect us at the mall, it would not follow that we should be allowed to carry weapons. The arguer also falsely assumes that before the attention to terrorism there were armed police officers in the cities sufficient to deter terrorists from attacking citizens.

I think you can get the general idea. The editorials either create false assumptions, false dilemma's, will make a claim that cannot be supported, etc.

The most famous fallacy - newspaper editorial is the letter, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus".