Defending Fox News: A Liberal's Perspective

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In the article, “A liberal’s defense of Fox News”, Susan Estrich argues that the claims against Fox News are invalid and quite lacking. Estrich herself works at Fox News as a commentator and she seems to be quite qualified for her job as she is a tenured and titled law and politics professor at University of Southern California. For most of the part, Estrich delivers what seems to be a solid defense of Fox News. Estrich particularly writes the article amidst criticism faced by two journalists of Fox News regarding not following proper journalistic procedure in two separate interview that they had. The article was published in 2005 when the US was dealing with the aftermath of Iraq War and also faced several other issues of deficit. Estrich defends the actions by Fox News and further tries to paint Fox News as a news channel that follows proper journalistic integrity. Despite the article appearing to be convincing, I would not recommend the article to WRI 101 freshmen because the …show more content…

Estrich not only falls prey to generalization fallacy but also to faulty cause and special pleading fallacies. The greater issue with Estrich’s arguments is that the premise in her arguments are not supported by strong evidence. In many cases, Estrich does not provide any evidence for the claims that she makes. The lack of evidence and the use of fallacies collectively make Estrich’s article a very poor defense of Fox News. It should also be understood that many of Estrich’s arguments are also not explicitly mentioned and hence an average reader might not be able to infer Estrich’s arguments. Indeed, Estrich could have made her argument stronger by supporting her claims by strong evidence and writing in a clearer and concise

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