Did I hit the nail in the head of this argument? Thanks for your help!
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19 Jan 2015, 18:25
“In a recent citywide poll, fifteen percent more residents said that they watch television programs about the visual arts than was the case in a poll conducted five years ago. During these past five years, the number of people visiting our city’s arts museums has increased by similar percentage. Since the corporate funding that supports public television, where most of visual arts programs appear, is now being threatened with severe cuts, we can expect that attendance at our city’s museums will also start to decrease. Thus some of the city’s funds supporting arts should be reallocated to public television.”
The argument above describes how, according to a poll, the local city art museum visits have increased over the last 5 years because of an increase in number of viewers on the local public television’s visual arts programs. The author speculates that since the public television’s main sponsor is threatened by severe cuts, the city should step in and fund the public television in order to maintain interest in the local art museum.
There are some clear fallacies with the argument presented by the author. The first issue with the author’s statement is that he assumes that the art’s museum visits increase its directly correlated with the increase in viewers of visual art programs on public tv. Indeed if the relationship would be proven not to exist his whole argument would fall apart. For example it would be absurd to assume that tv shows about cars broadcasted on local tv channels would boost sales at local car dealerships.
Another fallacy in the authors’ argument is the belief that local tv programming is the only cause of the the number of visitors’ increase at the museum. Museums have many ways to attract new visitors: for example launching a new marketing campaign, investing more money on prestigious exhibitions, and so on. It is very unlikely that one factor accounts for the majority of the results.
Lastly, basing the whole argument on a survey, or a city poll in this case, can lead to wrong conclusions. In the provided text it is not specified whether or not the population in this city changed over the last five years. An increase in population, let’s say of 15%, would imply that viewers habits did not really change. Other factors such as tv penetration per household and number or hours spent watching tv can affect and bias these results even more.
In conclusion, the argument presented by the author is extremely flawed and the city should not decide to fund public television only by basing its decision on this argument. However the author’s flawed argument could be addressed by establishing how new museum customer have been attracted: this could be done, for example, distributing a survey to visitors once they enter the museum.