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93. The following appeared in a memorandum fromthe manager of KMTV, a television station.“Applications for advertising spots on KMTV, our localcable television channel, decreased last year. Meanwhile a neighboring town’slocal channel, KOOP, changed its focus to farming issues and reported anincrease in advertising applications for the year. To increase applications foradvertising spots, KMTV should focus its programming on farming issues aswell.” Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc. The manager of KMTV suggest that their channel should focusits programming on farming issues to increase advertising applications forspots, he based this argument on the observation that neighboring towns haveincreased applications doing so. This argument is problematic in the followingways. First of all, the manager assumes that the increasedapplications in the neighboring channel is due to their programming on farmingissues without providing any supporting evidence. This assumption is not soundin the sense that there are lots of factors that could contribute to increasedapplications, such as better business atmosphere, cheaper advertising spotsfee, or the applications received last year is 10 year low so an increase justbrings the application to the normal level. Lacking evidence that the increaseis due to the programing of farming issues, we can not come to the sameconclusion the manager has. Another problem the argument suffers is false analogy. Evenif we grant the preceding assumption that the neighboring channel has anincrease due to farming programs, it doesn’t follow that this town would has anincrease by doing the same thing. It’sentirely possible that the neighboring town is an agriculture focused town thusfarming is in the interest of viewers ,whereas this town is focused on tourism, so no one wouldcare about agriculture. In this case, programming farming issues would not helpat all. Most conspicuously, even if we grant all the assumptionslisted above, having an increase lastyear doesn’t guarantee an increase next year. Everything is changing, people have different priorities in differenttimes. Last year farming is an favored issue doesn’t eliminate the possibilityof favoring another issue, say, petroleum, next year. In conclusion, the manager oversimplifies the cause ofKMTV’s reduced application and KOOP’s success. To strengthen the argument themanager would have to provide detailed evidence to rule out other possibilitiesthat result in reduced applications. And the manager would also need to provethat the towns are similarly enough to employ the same programming strategy,and that the trend of favoring farming programs is going to last. |
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