Nonrepresentative Instance

Creating a distortion by providing data that does not accurately or reasonably reflect reality.

• A meteorologist on the Weather Channel stated "In Indianapolis this summer, there were only six days when the temperature reached a high of only sixty degrees Fahrenheight."

  The meteorologist did not intend to imply that the warmest days this summer in Indianapolis were sixty degrees Fahrenheight. He meant to say that there were six very cool days this summer in Indianapolis, with temperatures no higher than sixty degrees Fahreneight.

• Michelle Malkin of Fox News stated on the TV show "Hardball with Chris Matthews", that John Kerry's wound was "self inflicted", meaning that the shrapnel from an explosion came from his own grenade. Chris Matthews interpreted her statement as "John Kerry shot himself". Michelle Malkin denied saying that "John Kerry shot himself".

  She later stated to Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" on 8/20/04: "It's not that he deliberately occasioned these wounds upon himself, its that they may have been self-inflicted."

  According to Webster's dictionary the term "inflict" means "to cause suffering" . One of Webster's definitions for "cause" is the word "motive" which implies intent.

  Stating that a person did not deliberately cause a self-inflicted wound is a contradiction in terms and an attempt at ambiguity. See [Ambiguity]

  The choice of using those obviously inflammatory words, however, lends itself to the argument that deliberate action was taken toward smearing John Kerry's reputation by Michelle Malkin.

• Neil Cavuto of Fox News made the statement that Prosecutors are going after celebrities for Fame as a primary motivation. He failed to state the fact that the victims are the ones who are bringing the charges and that Prosecutors don't get paid commissions. Or do they?

• Determining ahead of time, who would be best at managing the armed forces, by comparing someone who is only a United States Senator to the President of the United States of America, and basing the argument on the salience of the records, as though the Senator had any opportunity to direct the armed forces as Commander in Chief.

• Any time someone measures poll data by county. Karl Rove, in a speech before the RNC, measured voting information by county instead of state. "More counties in the history of the united states voted for Bush." Keep in mind that there are counties with only a few hundred people who happen to be mostly Republican. There are some counties with millions of Democrats. Chicago's dominance in the senatorial election won a seat for Barak Obama by a large margin against Alan Keyes.

  Karl Rove went on to say "More people voted in the 2004 election than any in history!". Well, there are certainly more people around than in history.