Think About It. Cause and Effect. News stories often report successive events with the unstated implication that the first was responsible for the second. A recently popular example fed by the Associated Press and used by Business Week, Huffington Post and countless other news outlets carried similar titles. “Denver man ate pot candy before killing wife.” As is customary to protect from allegations of libel perhaps, the last line of the CBS story was “It is unclear whether police believe the marijuana directly influenced his behavior.”
This kind of Reefer Madness reporting was once called Yellow Journalism and now poses as a BREAKING STORY.
Somehow at six individual high schools in three separate states I took four years of Latin. (Seems education was different then.) In my travels a teacher somewhere sneaked in the phrase Post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning “after this, therefore because of this”. Knowing me, you can imagine a “discussion” on the subject ensued. All was well after I was reminded that this was a class in language, not logic. I don’t know who thought that one up, but it could be included among the great fallacies of classical thought, and should not be perpetuated in today’s publications.
Similar stories speak of events preceding everything from dreaded illness to climate change with as much validity. How many times have we seen reports on how many more people are afflicted with some dreadful illness than ever before? There is seldom a mention that doctors and researchers have more knowledge and better tools for discovery, along with speedier communication methods than previously available for reporting observations.
Ads for medicines and drugs are doubly expensive due to the necessity of listing documented occurrences that may or may not have been related to the potentially beneficial product. On a regular basis we are told that the latest weather is the result of one of our errant practices like driving a car, using air conditioning or toasting marshmallows on a bonfire. Fortunately we no longer have the good hairspray that buoyed our bouffant so well. The world may be better for that.
Seriously folks, as we go through a life of needier news purveyors and point-of-view pushers, it seems to me we should look carefully at reports that suggest events of the past have necessarily created the circumstances of today. Check to see if we can really infer from a prior event a Cause and Effect. Think About It.
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