The following is a memorandum from the business manager of a television station.

"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand our coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

The author of this memorandum has stated that changes to a television station has caused increased complaints from its viewers as well as decreased advertising revenue. Therefore, the manager has decided that there should be increased air time for local news and the weather to fix these problems and to attract new viewers. However, though this sounds like a good plan, there are many assumptions this manager makes that should be analyzed.

First, the issue with the news program air time could not be the problem. Instead, it could not be with the quality of the news programs that is the problem. To illustrate, it is possible that a news or weather presenter has said something to offend a lot of people and consequentially, people have been complaining to the news manager about the coverage being too vulgar and not because there is less time devoted to the news program. Thus, the author of the proposal to attract more viewers would be wrong in making the assumption that increasing air time to news or weather programs will increase its viewers.

In addition, there are many reasons as to why advertisers may have pulled their ads from the late-night news program. It is reasonable to assume that the advertizers have pulled their ads from the program due to decreased viewers of the program and therefore the ads. The assumption by the manager that change must be made to increase the number of viewers is reasonable, however there are other plausible explanations that prove this assumption wrong. For example, it may be the case that advertisements have increased in price which caused the local businesses to pull out of the news program. Additionally, it is possible that local businesses have found that advertising was ineffective due to the products themselves that have nothing to do about the news program and decided that it would be a waste of money if they continued to buy air time. Both of these explanations shoot down the possibility that expanding the local news and weather coverage would be needed to increase the

Lastly, there is more than one source of news available that people can use to get news. In the digital age, more and more young people have the news (both local news, national news, and weather) at their fingertips. This means that they do not have to wait until 10pm to hear the news or wait in between annoying ads just to see the weather forecast. If this proves true, then the manager would be incorrect in his assumption that changing late-night coverage would increase the amount of viewers because he or she does not address the problem of mobile electronic devices that deliver all news and weather more effectivly to an entire generation. Also, local businesses may make use of big data gathered by these same mobile devices to track more targeted people for advertisement and pay less than they would for advertisement on late-night news programs. Since the author failed to take this into account, he would also be wrong in his assumption that changing late-night coverage will prevent the decrease in ad revenue.

All in all, the author seems to be making assumptions where one change has caused other problems with out taking into consideration other factors that may have brought about those same changes.