"Readers Digest Reasoning"

On another blog, I found myself in an amusing discussion over a "tort reform" advocacy site. One of the site's authors was defending the site's approach to the subject - which boils down to lifting sensational headlines from the news, and "reacting" to them, usually without delving any deeper to see if the news story contains factual error. The site's ideology means that this presentation is entirely one-sided. That is, the only type of litigation described on the site are cases the authors deem worthy of ridicule. (The author claims that there is balance on the site, for example because it has a letters section where the proponents may choose to print contrary opinions, and they occasionally link to other resources which take contrary positions.) Needless to say, this type of one-sided, bad analysis is anything but unique in the world of "tort reform".

Although more formally known as the "Hasty Generalization", I think of that type of fallacious logic as "Readers Digest reasoning" because, with no offense intended to that publication, that is where I first encountered this particular rhetorical tool, and it is one that publication has historically used with significant frequency. The proponent of a position collects a set of sensational anecdotes, and strings them together to advance a political position. If you look past the surface such an argument usually falls apart pretty quickly - the "examples" are found to be completely unrelated and isolated, and the "trend" ostensibly shown by stringing them together simply doesn't exist.

Yesterday, CJR Daily brought us an example of this type of flawed reasoning, as applied by Conservative pundits to the supposed demise of Christmas:

Stories about banned Christmas carols and employers forbidding the use of "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays" seem to pop up each December. Over the past few days, however, the issue has been moved front and center by a hungry press, with stories popping up in the national media almost daily, and conservative television host Bill O'Reilly running a daily segment titled "Christmas Under Siege."

But wade through the wall-to-wall coverage of the story, and it becomes apparent that there are only a handful of examples -- three, to be exact -- being recycled in article after article. Many of these pieces use the same incidents in almost the same way. Some even hit for the cycle, as USA Today did today, referencing all three stories in one shot.

* * *

When not flogging the same three stories -- two of which are essentially false -- to create the appearance of a genuine national trend, the media is busy interviewing the same outraged representatives of a few conservative family groups trying to put the Christ back in Christmas. The Alliance Defense Fund, for example, has been cited in numerous stories in the past week, as has the Rutherford Institute, another conservative group.

This is also how we ended up with the notion of the juvenile "superpredator", and ended up as a nation spending hundreds of millions of dollars on "punk prisons" in an era of declining juvenile crime. This type of nonsense frequently gets repeated, without any apparent level of thought, by our nation's media. Because it is so sensational?