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.


In a memorandum of a business manager from a television station, the author suggests that in order to increase popularity and regain the revenues from advertising contracts, the television station should apply the weather and local news section to all their news programs. He illustrates his stance by giving evidence such as the complaints from the audience, the contracts cancellation rate, and so on. However, I find his logic ungrounded and rife with holes; hence, he cannot convince the audience that the strategy of weather and local news is beneficial for the growth of the television station.

First off, the author assumes that the decreased time of weather and local news caused complaints, but his evidence is not sufficient to persuade the audience. The author does not provide any quantitative data to support his argument that most complaints are about weather and local news deduction. To illustrate the changes, the most convincing evidence would be a comparison of the numbers of complaints on weather and local news time between before and after the decrease. It is highly possible that in the past, complaints were also mainly on those topics due to other reasons, such as the lack of quality. The change of the decrease cannot be guaranteed from only looking at the complaint number at one time point.

Secondly, the author utilized another piece of information as evidence: the cancellation of advertisement sponsors. Again, he failed to mention the number of advertisements sponsors before and after the decrease in time of weather and local news, which cannot persuade the audience that the advertisement decrease is correlated with the change in news content. What’s more, even with a clear demonstration of numbers of advertisement, the causal relationship between the decrease in weather and local news and cancellation of contracts can still hardly be established. A statistical test would be necessary and other variables need to be considered, such as the popularity of the television station, the quality of the other shows, and the general management of the station. The cancellation could be attributed to one of the other reasons: for instance, the hosts of the television station are not interesting and professional, making the shows dull and bland. Without enough popularity, the businesses cancel the contracts as they realize that the television station would not be a good place to advertise their products.

Last but not least, the author contends that the television station should expand the weather and local news section to all of its programs. However, this is an ungrounded generalization as we are unsure if all news programs are suitable for putting in weather and local news. Consider news programs for celebrities, music, or sports with weather and local news blending in. This is quite dissonant with the overall ambience of the programs, where the weather and local news section does not add color to its original content, but makes it more bizarre. Furthermore, adding the section into every program will cause repetitiveness of the information delivery. The redundancy of listening to the same news or weather forecast again and again will hinder their willingness to turn on the television.

In essence, due to the lack of supportive quantitative data and over generalization, the author failed to draw a conclusion that weather and local news should be included in every news program to attract a larger audience.