fake news

Fake news

This article uses ethos, pathos, and logos to its full potential. Starting with ethos, the author raises the credibility of the men in the article throughout the whole thing. The author actually makes the characters in the article seem incredible by letting the reader know how unexperienced they all are. He does this for example by saying “Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching youth with gray eyes, hair mowed close to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard. When he isn’t smoking a cigarette, he’s lighting one.” This shows he is just some normal kid, making the most of his situation. The author does this with the rest of the characters mentioned to make them seem somewhat less intelligent. To use pathos, the author does the same thing as he did for ethos. He makes each character seem more like a human. An example of this is later in the story while describing Boris, when he says “He listens to a lot of gangsta rap: the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan; after watching Notorious, the 2009 biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to visit Brooklyn, a New York City borough he imagines overrun more by gangsters than hipsters.” This tactic appeals to the human element because mostly everyone that reads this article has listened to or heard of those rappers and know about the hipsters in New York. He appeals to logos by adding the part at the end about how the “clans” of fake news creators were caught and shut down. This appeals to logos because as intellectuals read this, they wonder how people like this are allowed to continue to profit off of lies. The “so what” of this is a common thought of many people reading this article: where does fake news come from? I often wonder how it is allowed to get all the way to mainstream media like Facebook and twitter but this article answered that for me.