Fallacies constantly weave into our news industry. In The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, these are picked out and embellished in a hilarious fashion. In his June 28, 2007 episode he talks with John Hodgeman about the immigration diseases. While discussing these you hear one fallacy after another. One of the first I noticed was when the news casters were talking about how some diseases are coming back, such as leprosy, and it’s because 12 million illegal aliens entered our country. Coincidental correlation is obvious because 60 minutes reporter points out a United States Department of Health and Human services document that talk about how there had been no proven correlation between leprosy cases in the United States and immigrants.
After listening to John for a while, Jon expressed his concern, "it sounds like a scare tactic." John smoothly transitions off of a mutation of Stewart's statement.
"You're right Jon, it is scary. But it doesn't stop at disease." I see this as an example of the straw man fallacy. Rather than dealing with the argument at hand he moves to something he can win the debate with. This episode also displays the anonymous authorities fallacy. As quoted from John Hodgeman,"you heard what a person said on t.v. Jon." We not only do not know where the news caster got the information from, we do not even know who the news caster is that John got it from. Personally, no one convinces me less than an anonymous television news caster.This comedic show had so many fallacies that I could never talk about each one, but Jon Stewart definitely knows how to spot the illogical words on the news.
Non-fiction is typically a genre avoided by pleasure readers due to its lack of personality, and ability to paint a picture in the reader's mind; fiction can be too farfetched for truth seekers. The facts of a story contradict with how the characters would have perceived it at the time, so author's always avoided crossing over the fiction, non-fiction line. In Tim O'Brian's How to Tell a True War Story he embraces the gray area between fiction and non-fiction. He explains how to really be able to put the reader in the shoe's of the character, he must tell them the truth how the character saw it not the facts. Because of his choice of topic, he is able to describe the events in such a manner that could make most relate in our war ran world.I love the emotions that are accessed through this method in his writings. He eliminates the one thing that I thought always made non-fiction so dry, telling the history books facts rather than the person's experience. As he beautifully words it, “What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way." I love his perspective on the sentence War is hell because stereotypes and generalizations are not very hard hitting, instinct believed statements. I feel like his blunt explanation of morals is a great way to cut out the Hollywood perspective that so many now have of a glorious moral war and weed out those that are told for entertainment purposes only.
