Logos, Pathos, Ethos

1375 Words6 Pages
Analyzing: “Plugged In, Tuned Out” With the rise of popularity in the media, some fear that young Americans are becoming less exposed to the news. Many adults who grew up watching the news and reading newspapers fear that with this lack of exposure, young Americans will fail to obtain knowledge of the world’s most vital current affairs. When it comes to proposing an effective argument, appeals such as logos, ethos, pathos and kairos are used to persuade the audience in a particular direction. Logos refers to the use of logic appeal to attract the reader into a rational argument. In “Plugged In, Tuned Out…” the author uses logos extensively in order to support the idea that young adults have decreased their amount of attention toward the news in comparison to past generations. The article use of logos is manly clear in the use of percentages and evidence provided by Nielsen/NetRating reports. The easiest way to draw audiences to a topic is providing shocking information to generate views. In this particular case the numbers presented are not shocking but reveal important trends that are taking place in current time. For example according to the paper in the 1950s 53 percent of Americans in their 20s read newspaper coverage of national politics, while today only about 30 percent watch any kind of news coverage and 24 percent don’t even care to watch at all. This shows that the argument of a decaying news audience is well supported by studies and statistics. Another big source of information for this essay is Nielsen/ NetRatings. Nielsen is a company that mainly focuses on providing companies such as NBC, CBS, and ABC numbers on many things including the number of viewers at a determined hour, peak times, primetime information and results on new shows. Although there are problems with Nielsen methods, for example they only survey people by phone calls and do not
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