The Bottom Line? Boris Pulls a Brian

Boris Epsheyn’s recent comment on Brian Ross’s recent misreporting in relation to the Michael Flynn plea, is, as is typical with “Bottom Lines,” not terribly original or thought out.  It’s a rehashing of the “fake news” trope favored by Trump and his supporters.

Epshteyn attempts to turn Ross into a synecdoche for the media in general, suggesting that Ross is emblematic of a hostility to the president endemic in the media.

Not surprisingly, Epsheyn himself distorts the facts, even has he chastises others for doing so.  He supports his assertion by noting that Ross had erroneously reported that the Aurora movie theater shooter was a member of the Tea Party.  This is to establish the point that Ross is vehemently anti-conservative.  However, one of the other (of several) times Ross got a story wrong was reporting that Saddam Hussein was behind anthrax attacks in the U.S. after 9/11.  That goes unmentioned, of course, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative Epshteyn is weaving.  (For the record, even the Bush administration, to their credit, tried to steer ABC right on this story—that’s how far out it was.)

Why Y2K? Classic Bait-and-Switch Argumentation

Last time around, we noted that a common rhetorical technique/fallacy is to attack one unrepresentative case as typical of the class to which it belongs. The same thing works the other way: praising a single example as a way of suggesting all others are just as good.

A case in point is Mark Hyman’s recent praise of the Trump administration’s elimination of regulations regarding the “Y2K” software glitch from days of yore.

Hyman notes that it is silly to have regulations/policies in place for something that happened 17 years ago (and didn’t do much even at the time).

Fair enough (although it’s largely a symbolic move, since apparently these regulations/policies are understandably ignored today). But if you think this is about Y2K, think again.