Broadcast Journalism Affectation. Fallacious?

Yes, Bo, It helps when you have a chance to ask questions. I think what may be happening here, and it's mildly backed up by experience, is budding broadcast journalists are taught to emulate those who are successful. Those they are emulating may or may not have an agenda, and the student may or may not have the same agenda, but when the affectation is imitated, I wonder if that can drive the thought process of the person doing the speaking. I guess I'm talking about a kind of priming. For instance, if a person grew up in a culture where speech tended to be whined, rather than spoken assertively, could there be a tendency for those with that affectation to feel sorry for themselves? Likewise, if someone learns to speak in a culture with assertive speech, would the tendency be toward self-confidence? With these examples in mind, I think it would be interesting to see if there is a pattern of cynical affectation in use that generally degrades the quality of broadcast information.

I just wanted to quickly add that don't tend to think in terms of conspiracies, and would suggest that if true, this would be a descriptive rather than a prescriptive problem. In other words, no one planned for it to be this way, it's just how it has worked out. Thanks, Bo, for doing your part in spreading the vaccine of critical thinking and positive humanism. I may be a dreamer in that I think we can change the world by learning to think critically, especially if we're able to examine our own epistemic. It's nice to know I'm not the only one.

Interesting observation. In linguistics, context is very important. I think this might be what you are observing. For example, if I said, "the children have no shoes," while my business partner is about to order a $950 bottle of wine, the implication is clear. The unspoken argument is that you shouldn't spend that much money on a luxury item when others have so little. Members of the media (usually ones with an agenda) are masters at this, because they know how to communicate a message without actually making an argument. Most people listening don't know what just hit them, yet they might be persuaded. When someone attempts to pull this off in a conversation, I like to to use my inquisitive, yet polite "what do you mean by that?" line. This forces the person to either explicitly state their claim/argument, or withdraw the implicit one.