Response to "Intro to Critical Thinking".

The article concerning comedy news telecasting, along with my own personal experience with the genre, leaves me predisposed to deem commentators like Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and others as highly critical thinkers, far more so than the typical TV news anchor. As Alyssa Quart hints at in “The Sarcastic Times,” it takes real understanding and synthesis of ideas and information in order to work with them in such a way as to elicit humor from a situation, political or otherwise. While traditional anchors are simply tasked with redistributing particular bits of information they witness, either firsthand or secondhand, comedy news personalities are forced to question situations presented by the media, conduct research beyond what the national media is willing to divulge, and then produce their own take on these situations based on their findings and critique. When compared to the critical thinking models proposed by Fisher in his introduction, the Maddow/Olbermann approach most accurately reflects the Edward Glaser model because of its emphasis on knowledge of tools used to think critically, and the further emphasis on skillfully applying these tools to a problem.

Frank Rich’s article “The Rage is Not About Health Care” is also a prime example of critical thinking because it poses an alternative reason for a problem that is currently being accepted commonly as being attributed to the healthcare bill. In this article, Rich posits that the issue isn’t Republican opposition to healthcare, but rather extremist opposition to the drastic change that is currently sweeping the political and social climate of the US. In order to come to such a conclusion, based on incidents such as the map on Palin’s facebook page or the epithets to congressional Democrats, general knowledge about anger attributed to the healthcare reform must be combined with knowledge concerning these other topics, and this must all be collectively considered at once as one broad issue based on questions asked about who provides insight into the origins of the healthcare protests, what is actually being said/done in anger, etc. This example most accurately reflects the Ennis model of critical thinking, in that this kind of analysis requires an extremely high level of reflection on multiple topics, and coalesces in a way that ends in Rich, and readers, altering their opinions on a topic.