The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.
"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand our coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
The argument states that the late-night news program of a television channel devoted more times towards national news. As a result those audiences having interest in local and weather channel loose interest on that television channel. The advertising agencies also have canceled their contract with the television channel in their late night shows. So to prevent such revenue loss and to retain interest of audiences in their late night shows author has suggested some measures .The argument, however, relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. It is infested with poor reasoning and thus, it is rather specious.
Firstly, author did not mention any reason behind their migration from local and weather news to national news. It may be an experiment to increase their business. Another serious question does arise when the complaints were received from viewers and there were no urge to change the program pattern then. It may be possible that the television channel may be in transition from local to national television channel. So to getting more audiences at national level the channel may be devoting more time to national news rather than local news. It may be one of the reasons why the television channel neglect those complain received from their local viewers. Thus we need to know the proper reason to understand the argument.
Secondly, the author shows that the local business canceled their contracts with the television channel. Author did not mention the exact reason for that action of advertising company. There may be other possible reason like dispute with those advertisement companies or many more reason possible. Thus the assumption provides weak support.
Thirdly, author did not mention about the decrease in the number of the viewers. They may complain but do they adapt the change later? Author assumed that there are decrement in the audience number but does not provide any information to support that assumption. Without these details, the assumption is seriously weakened.
Finally , reverting again to the local and weather news does not guarantee that the television channel will get their old audiences back . It may be possible that in between these time those audiences found another suitable channel accordingly their choices. So the assumption of regain the revenue again may be unreasonable.
Thus, the arguments fails to consider the above mentioned facts and therefore, it is rendered unconvincing to the reader. Had these details been mentioned along with supporting evidence, it would have appeared much more compelling.
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flaws:
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.4 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 5.845 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.84 0.12
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 25 15
No. of Words: 410 350
No. of Characters: 2128 1500
No. of Different Words: 191 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.5 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.19 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.523 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 163 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 136 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 87 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 45 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.4 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 5.845 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.84 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.301 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.529 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.066 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5