Monday, December 05, 2005

Monday, December 05, 2005

I Can't Watch the News I remember a couple of weeks ago talking to one guy at school about politics. This is nothing unusual. He and I engage in heated discussion about politics habitually. We happen to have the same opinions - we just like to discuss those shared opinions heatedly. He told me that his wife gets upset talking about politics. At first, I was set to condemn his wife for what I thought was a "wuss out" opinion. With my recent disappointment in the New York Times, my recent re-awakening concerning talk radio, and watching the news tonight, I'm beginning to validate her opinion. I watched about five minutes of Bill O'Reilly. The genius of Bill O'Reilly is that he appeals to those with no logical reasoning skills. If Bill O'Reilly came into the writing center at MTSU and presented the arguments on paper he presents on television, I could list strings of ways in which his logic is a total fallacy. This is the problem, in a nutshell - the TV audience, for the most part, are not logical thinkers. They get caught up in the sensationalism, in the shouting down, in the one-liners, the name calling, and they don't look at the underlying logic. His guests annoy me just as much. Please, guests, learn logic before you go on his show. He doesn't know what it is - Use it! Maybe that's too simplistic - he knows what logic is, but he also knows he can infantilize his audience by assuming they don't know how to follow a strain of logic. This is what makes me so sad - by playing on lack of education and lack of training in logic, an idiot like Bill O'Reilly can effect policy and the vote. If you don't believe he does, I say you are naiive. Never underestimate the power of the media.