Critical Thinking

After reading Alec Fisher’s “Critical Thinking: An Introduction”, we can consider Rachel Maddow and John Stewart strong critical thinkers. The Rachel Maddow Show embodies “sarcasm news”, which is essentially presenting news, just to a more sophisticated audience then what it use to be. Rachel Maddow uses critical thinking by taking “regular” news, analyzing it, questioning it, and then presenting it in a humorous yet truthful way. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as well embodies critical thinking, because he understands that “parody is truly a tool to which to strike back at political PR”. These two shows as well as a plethora of others these days take what is presented in news, and the stories that seem questionable, or ridiculous, they “make fun” of. The population appreciates these parodies of the news stories because they essentially questioned the story most likely before hand, but don’t seem to “critically” go any further, but Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow do. Although, on the opposite site of the spectrum I didn’t view Barney Franks or John Lewis’s “venomous slurs” at congressmen to be much of critical thinking. I view that more of unjust rash bashing, because I see critical thinking as more of a process, not an immediate bashing upon the story or person and their belief of a story.

Out of the multiple modes of critical thinking that Fisher explains, I saw “Critical thinking is a mode of thinking-- about any subject, content or problem in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures…” the most used by Maddow and Stewart. Both hosts seem to really understand the process of imposing their own intellectual standards upon stories, which in return helps their audiences impose their own intellectual standards on how stories are presented and how much of it they should believe. I also believe that the last definition Fisher explains about critical thinking being an active interpretation and evaluation is used by Stewart and Maddow by not just having their show once a week, which demonstrates that they see critical thinking as an ongoing active process. This shows that they use critical thinking on a daily basis by evaluating different stories to turn into parodies for their audiences.