STRAW MEN

Straw Man arguments in the media

A couple of straw men have sprouted of late: arguments ignoring an actual position and substituting a distorted version of that position.

McDonalds:- The fast food behemoth (and enormous real estate owner) has a series of adverts on television in which a cool young person says their friends have been claiming the meat in McDonalds is crap, and that they intend to investigate the claim for themselves. They find out that McDonald's meat is of a relatively high grade.
The meat quality is the straw man. The truism is that the criticism levelled at McDonalds, by the intended audience of the advertisements, concerns general nutrition values, salt and sugar levels and the presence of high concentrations of trans-fats, the quality of the beef is not being criticised.

AWB:- Terence Cole's inquiry into the Australian single-desk wheat trader showed "no-wrongdoings" by members of the Australian Government's Foreign Office during AWB's six-year kickbacks arrangement with Saddam Hussein in an Oil for Food deal.

Despite the fact an investigation of the Government department was not among the terms of reference of the inquiry, the commissioner heavily criticised the Government's apparently lackadaisical attitude to scrutinising the grain trader's activities in the Middle East even ignoring repeated warnings that there was someting amis.
Mr Cole made a couple of dozen recommendations to the Government which, between the lines read: 'You fellows have been up to some very dodgy stuff but we'll let it slide this time if you put these new regulations in place.
The Government takes the bit of the Cole inquiry report about "no wrongdoings", which is politico-legalese for no criminal conduct, and then starts demanding apologies for all the nasty things their critics have been saying about them.
The finding of "no wrongdoing" is being put forward to insinuate that the Government did nothing wrong.
Prime Minister John Howard said: "The Commissioner has found in the most emphatic of terms imaginable that there's not evidence of wrongdoing. We didn't have anything to hide and the Commissioner has found that there was no wrongdoing on the part of any of my ministers." - ABC News: "Government Cleared in AWB Probe"
Regardless of the fact the comissioner was not looking for wrongdoing, the statement that no criminallity was suspected among members of the Government is, in the big picture, very far from not doing anything wrong.

[Bruce's Rave and Rant]