PT94.S4.Q09 - Journalists often claim that their investigation...

sjosephkeleb

Journalists often claim that their investigation of the private lives of political leaders is an effort to improve society by forcing the powerful to conform to the same standards of conduct as the less powerful. In reality, however, the tactic is detrimental to society. It makes public figures more concerned with mere appearances, and makes everyone else cynical about the character of their leaders.

The claim that journalistic investigation of the private lives of political leaders is an effort to improve society plays which one of the following roles in the argument?

I chose (A) It is a claim that the argument attempts to refute. However, the answer was (B) It mentions a justification that is sometimes offered for a practice that, the argument concludes, has undesirable consequences.

I think I understand why (A) is not the correct answer, but I am not entirely sure why. To my understanding, the paragraph can be split into 2 parts: one side states a claim that justifies investigating the private lives of political leaders, and the
other states the bad consequences. The second part does not outright refute what the Journalists are saying, so (A) cannot be the right answer.

Does my train of thought makes sense? And does anyone have any tricks/guidance on how to avoid making the same mistake in the future? All help is appreciated.

Admin Note: Edited title. For LR questions, please use the format: "PT#.S#.Q# - brief description of the question."

peezusmcgee

In my opinion this question really plays on the directions of logical reasoning, perhaps more than most questions, in that there are two answer choices that do conceivably answer the question (the LR directions mention that it may in fact be the case that two answer choices could conceivably answer the question, I didn't know this until I started taking exams on LawHub). In this case, when I was taking this preptest, while A certainly passes the "sniff test" per se, B is such a good description of the role the phrase plays in the argument that I couldn't see A being a strong enough AC to justify choosing over it.

Dexterity

Yeah, I think A is incorrect for the exact reason you stated. The author isn't trying to refute the journalists' claim that they're doing what they're doing to improve society. If the author's objective was to refute that claim, they would have said something like this:

"Journalists say they're doing Tactic X to improve society, but that's actually not the case; in reality, they're doing Tactic X for a different reason."

This isn't the author's main point at all. The author's not saying anything about why journalists are resorting to this tactic; they're just saying that the tactic itself is bad. So, to pick A would be to misunderstand the author's main point, in my opinion.

To avoid this pitfall in the future, pay close attention to what the author says, obviously. But take note of what the author doesn't say, too. This should make it easier to sniff out answer choices that are out-of-scope or descriptively inaccurate.