Obama OutFoxed

As part of our homework in Political Science class we were assigned to watch the State of the Union Address. I felt that the speech was fairly well delivered. I was skeptical that some of the issues, like giving tax cuts to business that don’t ship jobs overseas, would honestly be addressed. I feel, being a union member,that he was just paying lip service to the unions that lobbied in his favor. Other then that his messages were on issues that any president would be required to address regardless of who was in office.

For my rhetoric article I decided to look at was Fox News response to the state of the union address. I knew despite their claim of being “fair and balanced” that they’d be against Obama, but it was disappointing how contentious a tone they used against him. The title of the article was “Obama’s Sorry State of the Union Speech”. The first sentence read as follows “President Obama’s State of the Union address was an incoherent, disorganized, and most regrettably defiant mess of a speech.” The title and first sentence set the tone for the rest of the article. It was a strong pathos statement that would hopefully be supported by logos in the body of the article.

The article goes on to criticize numerous parts of his speech. In summary they attack him for 3 million job losses, mentioning scientific evidence of climate change, criticizing the Supreme Court, and setting a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq. Many of the accusations in the article were very misleading. One such criticism was stated as follows “He referred to himself in the speech more that 100 times. And made absolutely absurd demands that appeared to be almost dishonest.” The first sentence isn’t really a legitimate argument but more of an implied criticism of Obama being self-centered. Is referring to yourself a bad thing? If it is, I’m guilty of same thing because I’ve referenced myself numerous times in this article. The state of the union is a speech given by and centered predominantly on the president so his self-references are justified. The second sentence is a criticism that contradicts itself. It uses words with strong pathos that appear to make a logos statement but by the end of the sentence it nullifies any absolute claim. What is “almost dishonest” supposed to mean? Bordering on lying? That might make sense if the following sentences cited specifically he was “almost dishonest” about, but it doesn’t. The following two sentences read as follows, “. But noticeably absent in his speech was any mention of how he handled the mirandizing of a terrorist captured after a failed terror attack on Christmas Day. -- The fourth such attack on our nation in just his first year in office. So it’s original assertion that Obama was almost dishonest isn’t backed up by anything he was “almost dishonest” about.

Its ending statement was that “It was messy, incoherent, disorganized, and most regrettably defiant. Which I guess when you think of it, defines the state of our union pretty well.” I don’t think any news station should take such a one-sided view of an issue and still claim to be “fair and balanced”. The media is licensed channels with the rational of serving the people by being a fact-checking device to inform the people of what’s going on in our country. I don’t trust either side of the aisle but I trust Fox and the other four media conglomerates even less.