Bias, Rhetorical and Argumentation

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American Rhetoric Movie Speech, “Citizen Kane” (1941). Bias is defined as having opinions about a group of people that are stereotypical, prejudiced, or judgemental. The areas that I found biased in the reading were when the campaigner says “the friend of the working man”. Another area occurs when Kane refers to a working person as a working man. These are both examples of gender bias. An example was also given of age bias, when Kane refers to a “slum child”. Fallacies occur when the author or speaker uses emotion the wrong way, or uses an illogical argument. I found four fallacies in this speech, including: Scapegoating, apple polishing, and the ad hominem fallacy. Scapegoating is defined as blaming a group or a person for a problem. In the speech Kane is blaming Gettys for the problems in the world. Apple polishing means, appealing to someone’s vanity to persuade him or her. In the beginning of the speech the campaigner refers to Kane as “the fighting liberal” and “the friend of the working man.” The ad hominem fallacy is described as attacking a person rather than attacking an argument. There were two incidents of ad hominem that I found in the speech. Kane refered to Gettys as “the evil domination” and “the downright villiany.” Rhetorical devices try to draw an emotional response from the reader or listener. The rhetorical devices I found in this speech included: Alliteration, hyperbole, and euphemism. Alliteration is described as the same consonant sound repeated in a number of words in a sentence. One instance that this was used is occurs when Kane stated “the working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests. The decent, ordinary citizens know that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed” (1941). This statement is also an example of using the
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