Blog 3 - Critical Thinking

Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart: Critical thinkers? Of course. In Alec Fisher’s article, “Critical Thinking: An Introduction”, he describes a few definition of a critical thinker.

Rachel and Jon are critical thinkers in the definition of Michael Scriven. Scriven states that critical thinking is “skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observations, and communications, information, and argumentation.” Rachel and Jon use satire in conveying news to the audience. They also use humor and wit because they not only take in the news, but really think about what it means to them and they interpret, and evaluation and then ultimately, communicate that to others of what their opinions are on the subject matters.

They are also critical thinkers because they doing what they want to believe in and they use their humor to convey news and opinions that also gives perspectives to their audiences to think for themselves what the news is really interpreting or what is really meant by different issues. These work portrays not only their analysis, but they are able to recognize problems, a way to work with the problems or issues, and they don’t nearly accept a conclusion without really thinking about what it means and what it means to them.

Barney Frank and John Lewis: The epithets shouted out to Barney Frank as an openly gay, and John Lewis as civil right hero as well as Barney Frank are conclusions. However, there were no critical analysis or thinking involved as they were simply mentioned as epithets. Perhaps the examples in “Rage is not about healthcare” demonstrate this point. People are raging not about the healthcare issue, but more for the intensity of the reality show, not focusing much on the true issue at hand. The critical thinking involved here is much to say that the problem evaluated by the columnist Frank Rich is that as it states, the interest of rage on television rather than the issues debating over health care.