english book
Mamondzai
Uncompleteexampleofassignment4.docxUncomplete example of assignment 4:
Dear Bergstrom and West,
I always thought that I was good at spotting bullshit, but after reading your book “Calling Bullshit,” I realized just how blind I truly am to the bullshit that consumes all forms of media. Reading this book helped me so much in the way that I take in news, and also the news that I tell people. I now tend to not talk about subjects unless I know all of the facts, and I also listen when people are telling me facts. I look at the world from a different perspective now, and I owe it all to this book. I feel like I have a skill that not a lot of people have, but a skill people should have if they want to feel informed in this day and age. Not only do I feel confident in weeding out Bullshit on my own, but I feel confident sharing with you how I have learned how to utilize your book and your lessons to route out the bullshit.
Like everyone I definitely have my biases, and like everyone else who is aware of their bias, I tend to read news articles that lean more moderate or more to the left. So I expected that when I read Fox news I would have an easy time finding bullshit since it is known to lean to the right. What I didn’t expect was to find so much bullshit from more moderate or left-leaning news like NBC. In an article by NBC titled “Jobless claims unexpectedly rise to 373,000, as job growth slows,” the author Thomas Franck outlines the current numbers around the problem. Franck gives numbers about the current unemployment numbers saying that “First-time jobless claims totaled 373,000 for the week ended July 3, compared with the 350,000 Dow Jones estimate. The previous week’s level was revised up by 7,000 from 364,000 to 371,000.”(Franck) That is higher than the original estimate, and also begs more questions since jobs are opening back up. In fact, a report “showed nonfarm employers added a better-than-expected 850,000 last month, it also revealed that the U.S. unemployment rate ticked higher to 5.9% compared with the 5.6% estimate.”(Franck)
There is a lot going on in this article from NBC, and a lot to question. There are lots of numbers that are thrown around this article, but not a lot of baseline numbers to go off of. The author gives statistics saying that “First-time jobless claims totaled 373,000 for the week ended July 3, compared with the 350,000 Dow Jones estimate. The previous week’s level was revised up by 7,000 from 364,000 to 371,000.”(Franck) With that previous claim, there are no additional facts telling the reader how much that varies in previous years. That could be a normal number, but instead, it is made to look like it is a scary number. There is also a graph that is presented that shows a spike in unemployment between sometime in the year 2020 and sometime in the year 2021. The graph does not show what months, and it only looks at data from one year to show a spike. The graph should show data from 10- 20 years to show how much unemployment differs but then evens back out. The article is written to only look at immediate facts out of context from how they play out over time. There is bullshit all around us. The more I look, the more I see and it’s scary because it is so subtle. If I hadn’t read the chapter in calling bullshit about how to read graphs, I probably never would have noticed the graph that really offered now baseline information. Not only is this in left-leaning news outlets, but it is also just as prevalent on the right.
Fox News published an article titled: “Mainstream media, Democratic lawmakers bash America throughout Fourth of July weekend,” written by Brian Flood. This article outlines instances in which members of the democratic party were “unpatriotic” in their comments leading up to the fourth of July celebrations this past weekend. There are a few instances in which this article is bullshit, and pulling ideas from chapter 10 of “Calling Bullshit,” the major B.S. is that if something seems too good or too bad to be true it probably is. When I was scrolling through Fox News and saw the article titled “Mainstream media, Democratic lawmakers bash America throughout Fourth of July weekend,” it seemed like a stretch so I figured I would look deeper into it. Most of the quotes that were taken can look bad out of context, but some of the quotes are simply reminders that America is built on violence and hate. That is something that I think we should remember, but to pull quotes out that are only referencing America in terms of hate does make it appear that all of these lawmakers hate America. There was also a quote that was pulled from the “New York Times” article that is also just so out of context that it appears bad as well. The bullshit in this article is from the fact that you can make any statistic or quote look bad if you only pull out the pieces of it that you need. Maybe there were a few lawmakers that really did say bad things in relation to the U.S., but to put them under the umbrella of all democrats is bullshit.
