Susan Dobra
Paper #1
April 18, 2004

Auntie Establishment Advocates Acccurately

How can you tell what to believe in the news anymore? Watching CNN and Fox News during the war in Iraq, it was difficult to separate the news from the propaganda. The famous toppling of the Saddam statue in downtown Bagdhad, for example, was shown over and over on both news stations, with what looked like hoards of jubilant Iraqis taking to the streets to express their gratitude for his ouster. Yet when I looked up the same events on the internet, Indymedia.org told a very different story. They displayed photos of the scene taken from a distance that clearly showed the "crowd" to be no more than a few dozen people, the mostly empty square all surrounded by U.S. tanks. From this perspective, it seemed that this was no "demonstration" at all, but rather a carefully orchestrated photo op. As I did more research, I found reports from eyewitnesses that the Marines were the ones who started removing the statue, first wrapping an American flag around Saddam's face. When that drew a stunned silence from the assembled "crowd," the Marines took the flag off and let the Iraqis finish the job of toppling the statue. None of this showed up on the footage shown by CNN and Fox. I felt deceived, duped--and very mistrustful of what I was being shown. Who could I trust? How could I find out what was really going on over there?

Recently I came upon a feature called "Ask Auntie Establishment" on the March 24, 2004, edition of Alternet.org, an online news source <www.alternet.org> that helped to answer these questions. I liked the joke ("anti-establishment" was what the newspapers used to call hippies and political radicals back in the day), so I thought I'd read it to see what "Auntie" had to say. The first letter was from a woman who was asking what to say to people who questioned why she trusted the news sources she found online and why she felt her information from those sources was any better than the mainstream news shows. It was a good question. We all know that anybody can put anything online. So why did I trust what I found online? Well, I didn't always. But the more I became familiar with certain sites that seemed trustworthy over time (such as Alternet and Indymedia), the more I would go to them for information. Even those sometimes overexaggerated things,  however. So my strategy was to go to a number of different news sources for the very important information. I'd go to the National Review, a right-wing news magazine, then to Alternet, a left-wing news source, and then to MSN online that was a kind of mainstream news source. Not only was it fascinating, but it also made me realize how differently the same events could be seen. From this, I gleaned my own ideas about what was really going on.

Auntie suggests the same thing in her answer. The issue she addresses is, as the letter writer put it, "With so many hundreds of news sources out there, how does anyone know who to believe?"  Auntie Establishment advises going to multiple news sources, and using "critical thinking." Well, I could get behind that. But was her argument a cogent one? In other words, was it a good argument? It felt right to me, but I decided to put it to the test, the same way I teach in my Logic and Critical Thinking class.  I decided to apply the steps to first analyze and then evaluate the argument, and what I found what that the Auntie Establishment's argument is indeed a cogent one, according to my evaluation. Auntie makes a good case; my only criticism is that she makes it sound too easy--and it's not.

To come to this assessment, I had to identify the main point--what is called the "conclusion" in logic and critical thinking. The main point of Auntie's letter, I decided, was this: You need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust. That's because Auntie Establishment says, "Progressive sources can contain just as much hyperbole and misinformation as conservative ones" and that to counteract that "you can go straight to the source." She also says, "For those times when original sources are unavailable or insufficient, it's helpful to resort to your own critical thinking."  So I put this all together into what I think is the main point or conclusion.  

The next question to ask is, how does she support this main point? What reasons does she give for saying it?  We call these "premises" in logic and critical thinking. The main premise, as far as I could tell, was in the last line of the letter: "Almost all news is biased; You need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust. Since this contains two separate statements (called "claims" in logic and critical thinking), I chose the one that best supports the main point (by asking "why" and then looking for whatever completes the answer with "because") Why do you need to go to the original sources and/or resort to your own critical thinking in order to find the news you can trust? Because "it's a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source." So that's the main premise.

My next task is to put the whole argument into the form of a syllogism, which is the "argument in a nutshell" in the form used in logic. A syllogism consists of three claims: two premises and a conclusion. What I have so far is one premise and a conclusion. So I need to find the second premise. One way to do that is to put the conclusion and main premise into a form called the "enthymeme," which is [A] --> [B] because [A] --> [C]. In an enthymeme, the  [A] --> [B] is the conclusion, and the [A] --> [C] is the main premise. If I do the enthymeme right, the missing premise (which is actually the underlying assumption of the argument) will be "All things that --> C --> B."  The "A" term has to be the same in both claims, and so I'll have to rephrase my conclusion and premise to make them both start with the same term (this is so that I don't end up with more than 3 terms, since a syllogism has to have 3 terms only).  

This is how I did it:
        A                                                                         -->            B
[Finding the most accurate, unbiased news] requires [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]
                            A                                                               -->        C
because [finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."]

I think that is pretty much the equivalent of what I said the conclusion and premise of Auntie Establishments argument is. Now, I can reconstruct the underlying assumption to be used as the missing premise: "All things that ----> C ---> B," which becomes " All things that are ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] require [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking."]

Now that I have two premises and a conclusion, I can construct my syllogism.  In logic, the conclusion always goes at the bottom of the syllogism (after a "therefore") and the premises go on top. So here is my syllogism:


All things that are ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] require [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

[Finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."]

Therefore, [finding the most accurate, unbiased news] requires [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

That's Auntie Establishment's argument in a nutshell. Now that I have analyzed the argument, I can proceed with evaluating it.

The first question I have to ask is, "Are the premises reliable?" To answer this question, I take the premises one at a time.  The first premise is  "All things that are ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] require [going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]. I think it is reliable because it makes sense to say that anything that requires asking questions and hunting down information will require critical thinking, and that will often but not always include going to the original sources. Since you can't always go to the original sources, critical thinking (which involves asking questions of multiple sources) is your second-best option.

The second premise is  [Finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is ["a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."], and I think it, too, is reliable because it is my experience that limiting yourself to one news source limits you to the biases of that source and what they consider important or not important.

The next question I need to ask is "Are the premises relevant to the conclusion?" I'll also answer this for each separate premise. For the first, yes, it is relevant to the conclusion because it has to do with what kinds of things require "going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking." And for the second, yes, it is relevant to the conclusion because it has to do with what is required to "[find] the most accurate, unbiased news."

"Are the premises, taken together, adequate to force the conclusion?" This is the third question for evaluation that I have to answer, and for this one, I take both premises together.  I say, yes, they are adequate to come to a definite conclusion, because I don't think they are leaving anything important out.

Now, I ask the final and most difficult question: "Is the argument valid?" Validity, in logic, means that the categories that the argument is made up of fit together structurally in a way that makes the conclusion definite. There are many ways to determine if an argument is valid (including diagramming it in what are called Venn Diagrams), but the way I do it is by applying three simple tests that, if the argument passes all three, identify it as a valid argument.  

In order to test for validity, however, I have to first translate each claim into a "standard categorical claim."  In other words, each claim has to be made to fit into one of the four standard forms, A, E, I , or O:
A: All ____ are ____
E: No ___ are ____
I: Some ____ are ____
O: Some ____ are not ______
Believe it or not, every claim in the universe can be made to fit into one of these four standard forms. Therefore, each of the claims of my syllogism will be able to be translated into one of the four forms.  Amazingly, when I do the translations, I discover that all three claims of my syllogism are "A" claims:

All [things that are "a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."] are [things that require going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

All [acts that are finding the most accurate, unbiased news] are ["things that are a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source."]

Therefore
All [acts that are finding the most accurate, unbiased news] are [things that require going to the original sources and/or resorting to "your own critical thinking"]

Now, it's time to apply the 3 tests for validity:

The first test asks, Are the number of negative claims in the conclusion the same as the number of negative claims in the premises?  Since there are zero negative claims in the conclusion and zero in the premises (because the conclusion and both premises are "All" claims, they are all "affirmative" claims rather than "negative" ones, like the E or O claim would be), the answer is "yes."

The second test asks, Is the middle term distributed in at least one of the premises? The middle term is ["things that are a question of being willing to ask probing questions and hunt for information from more than one source"] because it appears in both premises but not the conclusion (that's the definition of a "middle term"). It is distributed in the first premise (because it is in the S position of an A-claim, and that is a "distributed" position, meaning the term applies to all the things in a particular category). So it passes the first two tests.

The third test asks, Are any terms that are distributed in the premise also distributed in the premises? the term [acts that are finding the most accurate, unbiased news] is distributed in the conclusion (because it is in the S position of an A-claim) and, for that reason, it is also distributed in the second premise. The syllogism passes all three tests; therefore, it is valid

And, since its premises are also reliable, relevant and adequate, I can say with confidence that Auntie Establishment's argument is a cogent argument.

I'm happy to find that Auntie Establishment's argument is cogent, because I also happen to agree with her. One of the reasons I teach Logic and Critical Thinking is because it is such an important tool for understanding the complex information that comes at us these days. To its credit, the mainstream media seems finally to be stepping up to the plate and questioning some of the information that was fed to it a year ago and that it so willingly and unquestioningly repeated. It's now questioning, for example, if there ever was any solid evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But anyone who knew how to critically read the news was asking these questions last year at this time, and knew that the evidence was flimsy even back then. Going to multiple new sources and asking critical questions raised questions about our rationale for making war on Iraq that are only now being seriously considered in the mainstream media. It begs the question: If those in charge of calling for war were more critical thinkers and readers, would we have had to have this war at all?