Posted by
Juwar74 on Sunday, September 14, 2008 7:39:40 AM
For conservative talking heads to gain credibility among its audience, they must be at least three times as smart as them. And three times more deceptive. Because they know that the majority of their audience base their logic on their ideology, regardless of whether it is sound or supported by the facts, the conservative media big-wigs argue on the fallacy of relativism.
The Nizkor Project notes that relativist fallacy is committed "when a person rejects an argument by asserting that the argument might be true for others but is not for him or her. In this context, relativism is the view that truth and facts are relative. This is not the view that the argument will be true at different times or of different people, but the view that an argument could be true for one person and false for another at the same time."
The Nizkor Project also notes, in many cases, "when people say 'that X is true for me' what they really mean is 'I believe X' or 'X is true about me.' It is important to be quite clear about the distinction between being true about a person and being true for a person. A claim is true about a person if the claim is a statement that describes the person correctly. For example, 'Bill has blue eyes' is true of Bill if Bill has blue eyes. To make a claim such as 'X is true for Bill' is to say that the claim is true for Bill and that it need not be true for others. For example: '1 + 1=23 is true for Bill' would mean that, for Bill, 1+1 actually does equal 23, not that he merely believes that 1+1=23 (that would be 'It is true of Bill that he believes 1+1=23'). Another example would be 'The claim that the earth is flat is true for Bill' would mean that the earth really is flat for Bill (in other words, Bill would be in a different world than the rest of the human race). Since these situations (1+1 being 23 and the earth being flat for Bill) are extremely strange, it certainly seems that truth is not relative to individuals (although beliefs are)."
Contemplating the definition, conservative media takes advantage of this fallacy that is prevalent among its viewers. For example, conservative media knows that a good size of its audience fallaciously brand Obama a muslim, so they play on it.
Many times on news shows and radio programs, some right wingers will say "I'm not voting for Obama, he's a muslim." When the moderator will challenge such a claim or even provide evidence that Obama is not, the right-winger will get frustrated at the pressing and just throw up their hands and cry, "Well, he's a muslim to me."
Fox Business News, for example, also likes to use relativist fallacy when talking about economic issues. Listening to FBN, you would get the impression that Obama's or any Democratic economic plan will tax all middle class Americans, eventhough that is untrue. It all has to do with what FBN believes to be the middle class. To FBN, middle class is relative, which includes those Americans who generally make over $200,000 a year, when in actuality, middle class Americans generally fall between $37,000 to $100,000.
FBN knows that the majority of its uninformed audience do not distinguish between those who make over $200,000 a year (who benefit greatly from Republican tax cuts) and those who are actually middle class (who do not benefit from Republican tax cuts.). So instead of FBN making the distinction, they would just say "middle class," without actually defining their definition of "middle class", and hoping that the term alone would be taken to mean what most Americans regard as middle class ($37,000 to $100,000).
Not only does Fox do this on their business reporting, they do it with their reporting on politics, entertainment, the world and science.
The relativist fallacy is what allows FOX and many other conservative outlets to slide into propaganda, which is detrimental to the quality and standards to the rules of journalism.