It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Reading the stimulus, I thought there was the following logical gap in Anita's claim:
having a quandary about newsworthiness(the premise) and the guidance being inadequate(the conclusion).
So I picked (D) since I thought it meant the contrapositive of my pre-phrase. However, is (D) wrong because of "ethical dilemmas" since the stimulus refers to quandary specifically related to newsworthiness?
Also, is (E) wrong because of making a "professional decision"?
Then, why is (A) the correct answer?
Comments
the gap seems to be between the quandry of whether or not something is newsworthy, and ethical dilemmas. For the conclusion to be drawn properly it requires that answer choice A assumed . Given that the claim they are trying to weaken is a claim about guidance regarding ethical dilemmas, why would they cite an example that cannot raise ethical dilemmas? If whether a piece of information is not or is newsworthy cannot raise ethical concerns for journalists, then it appears that despite anita's counter argument, that the claims made by marcus still hold.
I think the problem with this answer that makes it hard to choose, is that we automatically assume that a quandry implies an ethical dilemma, which is not the case.
This is how I reached the correct answer:
Anita's conclusion: Traditional journalistic ethics (TJE) is not clear, adequate, and essentially correct for most ethical dilemmas.
Anita's premise: TJE doesn't provide guidance for situations where a journalist is not sure whether or not the information is newsworthy.
Analysis: I originally thought, what if Anita's premise is true, but these situations only make up a very small portion of ethical dilemmas? Then we can't say that her conclusion follows for most ethical dilemmas. The correct answer got at a different issue.
[A] is right because:
Marcus supports his claim by referencing what TJE would say about newsworthy information. Then Anita comes in and says, "what about information that isn't necessarily newsworthy?" But from Marcus's claim, we only know about applying TJE to newsworthy information. What if non-newsworthy information isn't even eligible for consideration under journalistic ethics? Anita is assuming that her example is a counterexample against TJE being clear/adequate/correct for most dilemmas. But what if her example doesn't even count as a dilemma? Then it's irrelevant and out of scope for the claim about TJE. For her claim to follow, we have to assume that her example is a relevant dilemma for TJE to address.
[D] is wrong because it doesn't have to be true for Anita's conclusion to follow. What if there is a possible system of ethics that accounts for every possible ethical dilemma? Could Anita's claim about TJE still follow? Yes.
[E] is too strong. Maybe there is an adequate system of journalistic ethics that does provide guidance for every case. But Anita is saying that TJE specifically isn't clear/adequate/correct for most dilemmas. But the "professional decision" part is certainly also a red flag, because what does that even mean...?