Editorial Summary
Firestone, D. (2023). Fox News remains an aberration in American journalism. The New York Times.
For the purposes of this paper, Firestone’s (2023) editorial claiming that Fox News must be held responsible for their work that deceives viewers and causes defamation was selected. The author refers to the recent lawsuit based on defamation claims that Dominion Voting Systems claimed against Fox News to make an argument that deceit in American journalism remains largely unpunished.
The editorial writer pursues the audience to believe that full-scale trials must be initiated against unethical and deceitful media organizations like Fox News to make a change and preserve American journalism for trustworthy and authentic media. The analysis of this editorial article is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the author’s argument and identify whether it is compelling.
The Premise of the Article
The premise of this article is essentially postulated in its title. The author deliberately claims that Fox News is an aberration of the field of journalism in the country, which is his onset argument to be supported throughout the editorial (Firestone, 2023). The overall argument is based on this premise, which is verified by the lawsuit against the news organization being closed before trial to avoid reputational losses. Since it is set in the recent context of the problem that has been covered in the media, this premise serves as a reliable background for building a strong argument.
Evidence Credibility
The analyzed article is interspersed with primary data references and verifiable evidence supporting the author’s claims. Specifically, Firestone (2023) refers to the New York Times news article on the lawsuit of Dominion against Fox News and a study on media trial frequency compared to civil cases. Similarly, he repeatedly cites precedents in the legal system that shows other cases of media organizations’ legal responsibility for defamation. The author refers to monetary data on lawsuit settlement, which is supported by links to verifiable sources. Therefore, the amount of evidence and its credibility based on the accuracy and reliability of the cited sources allows for stating that the evidence is credible.
Verification of Evidence
The evidence that the author uses might be independently verified by readers via following the active hyperlinks included in the text of the article. In addition, one might conduct one’s own search for primary data on the discussed lawsuit and the analysis of the implications of Fox News’ deceitful work for American journalism. For example, one might verify the evidence on the costs of fake news lawsuits against Fox News by referring to an academic article by Conklin (2022), who presents data on the same issue. Thus, since the presented evidence might be verified by readers independently, the support for claims is credible and trustworthy.
Counterarguments Addressed
The author addresses possible counterarguments in an implicit way by building the responses to hypothetical counterparts into the narrative. In particular, he claims that other news organizations might fail, too, but they do not deliberately lie like Fox does. His statement is as follows, “journalists in conventional newsrooms, unlike their counterparts at Fox, don’t actually plot to deceive their audiences.” (Firestone, 2023, para. 6). Similarly, the opinions of the audience that all news media is openly addressed to demonstrate the implications of such a misconception to the lack of proper defamation trials in the USA.
Indeed, the writer states that many people believe that all news organizations lie, which is why Fox News’ actions are not an aberration. However, “if that were true, there would be a lot more trials like the one that almost happened in this case” (Firestone, 2023, para. 3). The author successfully and proactively addressed a possible counterargument related to “press freedom issues” and “the threat that journalists” by referring to experts who predicted positive outcomes (Firestone, 2023, para. 8). Thus, the counterarguments are addressed effectively by the author of the editorial.
Interest Representation
In terms of the interests that the author might represent in this editorial, one might not detect any particular one. However, it is evident by the strong claims in support of truthful and reliable journalism that Firestone’s (2023) interest is to instill a culture of intolerance of fake news. Furthermore, the author’s goal is to facilitate proper legal responsibility for such organizations’ deceitful performance.
However, when analyzed in the context of media competitiveness and the implications of the content of the article being related to news, one might consider the interest of the author in promoting his organization and the larger political debate between the liberal and conservative sides. Such an opinion might be validated by the findings of Tully et al. (2020), suggesting that news outlets “are commonly perceived as conservative (Fox) or liberal (the New York Times)” (p. 215). Thus, the argument of the author might be biased in terms of his interest in promoting his medium and justifying a political perspective contrary to that promoted by Fox News.
Language Use
Overall, the article is written using an official tone of voice with an appeal to emotions and rationality. Indeed, the author deliberately uses strong affirmative phrases when delivering his opinion. For example, his use of such phrases as “no doubt a disappointment,” “hosts writhe on the witness stand,” and “what an abject aberration Fox has become” emphasize his decisive disapproval of Fox’s actions (Firestone, 2023, para. 1-2).
Using this language alongside refined style and professional language intertwined, the author tries to convince the audience of the unethicality and the outrageous implications of Fox News’ wrongdoings to the whole industry and American society at large. Another example might be the characteristics of the revealed text messages that showed Fox’s deliberate lies, which Firestone (2023) describes as “shocking both in their cynicism and in their deviation from industry norms” (para. 7). Such a word choice is designed to ignite the same feelings in the audience and convince the readers in the ethicality of the author’s opinion.
Detected Errors
The analyzed editorial article is composed in a concise yet informative manner characterized by professional references to reliable evidence and appeals to the author’s expertise and experience. Such an observation implies that there are no evident errors in knowledge or facts presented in the article. At the same time, the reference to one’s personal experience might be considered an error when discussing such objective issues as lawsuits that affect the whole industry. At the same time, the decisive tone of the author’s writing reveals his disrespect and possibly biased perception of Fox from the onset, which might be regarded as an error in thinking related to the confirmation bias (Peters, 2022). However, the format and genre of the article imply the presence of the author’s personal opinion as a driving force of the argument.
Logical Fallacies
The editorial is characterized by the use of several appeals that demonstrate fallacies in making the argument. One of the logical fallacies that the author uses is the appeal to authority, “which many legal experts said was a strong possibility” (Firestone, 2023, para. 6). In this case, the author refers to the representatives of the legal sphere to support his claims about the hypothetical outcomes of the trial that did not happen (Goffredo et al., 2022).
In addition, he refers to his personal experience and extrapolates it to the industry in general, which is a manifestation of the hasted generalization fallacy. He claims having “worked for more than four decades in six American newsrooms, large and small, and the pattern of behavior shown by Fox would have been unthinkable in any of them at any time” (Firestone, 2023, para. 7). However, these fallacies might be justified by the author’s experience and the expertise of the authorities he referred to when trying to make his argument stronger and more compelling.
The Article’s Compellingness
Overall, the analysis of the editorial article has revealed that the author effectively used the context of the issue, evidential data, response to counterarguments, and strong emotionally colored language to build his argument. The article contains verifiable and reliable supporting evidence, as well as the clear delivery of the author’s opinion. Despite the possibility of bias due to political interests and the appeal to logical fallacies, the argument remains strong, which is why it might be characterized as significantly compelling.
References
Conklin, M. (2022). The real cost of fake news: Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. University of Dayton Law Review, 47(17), 1-26. Web.
Firestone, D. (2023). Fox News remains an aberration in American journalism. The New York Times. Web.
Goffredo, P., Haddadan, S., Vorakitphan, V., Cabrio, E., & Villata, S. (2022). Fallacious argument classification in political debates. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (pp. 4143-4149). Web.
Peters, U. (2022). What is the function of confirmation bias?. Erkenntnis, 87(3), 1351-1376. Web.
Tully, M., Vraga, E. K., & Smithson, A. B. (2020). News media literacy, perceptions of bias, and interpretation of news. Journalism, 21(2), 209-226. Web.