Website About Logical Fallacies Pretty Much Commits Logical Fallacy

Oopsies.

Oopsies.

The nicely-done Your Logical Fallacy Is commits an unfortunate logical fallacy:

Here are some reasons you might want to order one of these pretty great posters:

2. To put up in your kids’ bedroom so that they get all clever and whatnot, and are able to tell the difference between real news and faux news *cough*.

So meta!

The implication is that Fox News is biased and other sources are “real news,” a demonstrably false claim since major news outlets are intentionally biased. This is known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

That Fox News is biased isn’t untrue, but they are singled out because they are known for being biased in a different political direction than other networks. The dig doesn’t explicitly point out the network, but let’s not kid ourselves.

The good thing is that the poster is free of obvious fallacy, though you can tell the creator leans a certain way if you look at the examples. It makes sense, though. If you enshrine logic enough to make a poster about it, under the current intellectual climate of the world you’ll tend to lean closer to some belief systems than others.

4 Comments

  • Jill says:

    Bah! Logical fallacies. In so many cases, they aren’t. But people like to look all smart and stuff when they declare No Scotsman! or Straw man! Red herring, anyone?!

    • Jay DiNitto says:

      I think, technically, that most fallacies occur when people are just employing humor, which is why I qualified with the “pretty much” in the title. It’s only a legit fallacy (haha) if it occurs in place of a rule of inference.

  • Jordan says:

    You should really avoid using conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences.

    -“That Fox News is biased isn’t untrue”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.