In response to the article “Global Warming Starts To Divide G.O.P. Contenders”, written by Marc Santora for the New York Times on October 17, 2007
I have begun to notice that each and every day I open up my copy of the New York Times, the articles and see countless quotations from anonymous ”experts” and “specialists” from fields that I haven’t even heard of. the first line of the article I am responding to is “While many conservative commentators and editorialists have mocked concern about climate change…”. Well I’d personally like to know who these people are?
How am I supposed to agree or disagree what is presented to me if I have absolutely no idea if the knowledge being presented to me is true, false, or even pertinent to the topic being discussed? And even if I was swayed by the material presented by an anonymous source, then how do I begin to know who to credit? Something else I have been seeing a lot of, and is presented in the same article, is the assumption that beliefs held by the majority. The following sentence in the article reads “It is a near-unanimous recognition among the leaders by global warming.”
This article, within the first paragraph, has both quoted people whom potentially don’t exist (since they didn’t name who they were) and then given an overwhelming statistic that was so vague, it could have had no real world impact if presented in person. (ex: the near-unanimous decision among leaders could have been a 2 to 1 [out of a given 3] survey given to the 3 opening managers at McDonald’s. The managers are both leaders and may hold opinions on global warming, thus would fit the description of this claim.) -Appeal To Anonymous Authority, Appeal To Widespread Belief , and Misunderstanding The Nature Of Statistics and shown here-
Another concept the world seems to both be playing and being played on is fear, or, emotions in general. In the article “Putin Says Caspian Is Off Limits to Attacks”, Russia and Iran are shown as pairing up in pursuit of a single goal. Though the goal is to stop attacks in a certain area, the concept of those two countries pairing up at all is a concept that should send a shiver through most of the United States. Another article which plays heavily on emotions is “Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking Second Chance”.
In this article, it discusses the fact that the United States is the only country in the United Nations which still sentences children and young teenagers to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The grandmother quoted in this article talked about how even though her 14 year-old granddaughter, along with her boyfriend, killed her grandfather and aunt, put her herself in a coma for 30 days, and attempted to kill her own 1- year-old sister, does not mean that now, at the age of 22, she doesn’t deserve a second chance. -Argument By Emotive Language-
Though I do not feel qualified to answer the obvious question, “Does she, and others like her, deserve a second chance?”, I do feel obligated to point out that this article does a very impressive job of playing on the emotions of the people. Regardless of what will be done about this situation, the country will have a very strong opinion about it one way or another simply from reading this article.
The articles I have mentioned, along with articles in general nowadays, do a very good job of arguing their points just the way they want to to get the response they desire. Articles now argue all the way from neutrally, to let the audience make up their own minds about the topic discussed, to extremely slanted, attempting to convince the audience to believe what they do and think like they do about a certain topic.
