Critic: The Gazette-Standard newspaper recently increased its editorial staff to avoid factual errors. But Conclusion this clearly is not working. Support Compared to its biggest competitor, the Gazette-Standard currently runs significantly more corrections acknowledging factual errors.
The critic tells us that the Gazette-Standard has recently increased the number of its editorial staff to catch factual errors in its newspaper. Based on this, the next thing we might expect to hear is that the Gazette-Standard has become increasingly accurate, publishing fewer factual errors. Instead, the critic tells us that the Gazette-Standard still runs many more corrections of factual errors it has published than its biggest competitor does. The critic hypothesizes that the reason for this is that the editorial staff are not successfully doing their job of catching factual errors.
The critic gives us a causal claim: the reason the Gazette-Standard runs more corrections than its biggest competitor is that the Gazette-Standard's new editorial staff aren't doing their job catching errors. But it's really important to see that the fact that the Gazette-Standard publishes more corrections than its biggest competitor tells us very little about the performance of the Gazette-Standard's editorial staff, because we don't know how the Gazette-Standard's accuracy has changed over time. There are several assumptions at play here: the author assumes that the Gazette-Standard and its biggest competitor are comparable, even though we don't know how big that competitor is, how much material it prints compared to the Gazette-Standard, etc. The author also assumes that the number of corrections issued by a newspaper is an accurate measure of how many errors are actually printed, which doesn't have to be true: some newspapers may not bother to correct their errors. But even if both these assumptions were valid, to decide whether the Gazette-Standard's editorial staff are successfully doing their job, we would still need to know how many errors the Gazette-Standard was making before the new staff were hired, compared to now. The argument doesn't tell us this anywhere. In other words, the critic's hypothesis tries to connect two phenomena--number of corrections compared to competitor, and performance of Gazette-Standard's editorial staff over time--without proving a solid relationship between them. This suggests that a great way to weaken this argument will be to find an alternative, more plausible explanation for why the Gazette-Standard runs more corrections than its competitor.
Which one of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the critic's argument?
The Gazette-Standard pays its editorial staff lower salaries than its biggest competitor pays its editorial staff.
This doesn't weaken the argument. How much the editorial staff are getting paid is irrelevant. We just want to know if the editorial staff are actually succeeding in catching errors.
The Gazette-Standard has been in business considerably longer than has its biggest competitor.
This is irrelevant. How long these newspapers have been in business doesn't tell us anything about how many errors they each publish, and how the number of errors is connected, if at all, to the Gazette-Standard's increase in editorial staff.
The Gazette-Standard more actively follows up reader complaints about errors in the paper than does its biggest competitor.
This weakens the critic's argument. This answer choice provides an alternative explanation for why the Gazette-Standard runs more corrections than its biggest competitor: not because the Gazette-Standard prints more errors, as the critic assumes, but because it responds more to reader complaints about errors than its competitor does. The competitor might print as many or more errors and just not receive as many reader complaints, or not respond to the complaints it does receive. Thus, by destroying the critic's assumption that because the Gazette-Standard prints more corrections, it actually prints more errors than its competitor, and by suggesting an alternative explanation, this answer choice weakens the critic's argument.
Weaken: Introduce or suggest an alternate explanation for the target phenomenon.
Strengthen: Helps to eliminate an alternate explanation for the target phenomenon.
The Gazette-Standard's articles are each checked by more editors than are the articles of its biggest competitor.
This is irrelevant. It just gives us more details about how the Gazette-Standard runs its editorial process compared to its competitor. But we already know that the Gazette-Standard has hired new staff: even if it's true that it's hired enough new staff to have twice as many editors working on each article as its biggest competitor, we still have to explain why it's running more corrections than its competitor does. This answer choice doesn't suggest an alternative explanation for why this is happening, and so it doesn't weaken the critic's hypothesized explanation that the editorial staff aren't successfully doing their job.
The increase in the Gazette-Standard's editorial staff has been offset by a decrease in the reporting staff at the newspaper.
This is irrelevant. For this to weaken the critic's argument and suggest an alternative explanation, we would have to assume that having fewer reporters would somehow lead to more factual errors, which doesn't have to be true. Perhaps the newspaper would just print less material until it hired more reporters, allowing each reporter to focus on the same number of stories as before. Since we don't know what the effect of fewer reporters would be, this answer choice doesn't provide an alternative explanation for why the Gazette-Standard prints more corrections than its biggest competitor, and doesn't weaken the critic's argument.
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