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by Annie Holmquist

After taking a hiatus from watching news programs for a while, a friend of mine recently turned on MSNBC. Following this experience, he said something along the following lines:

“I’m done. I just can’t take it. The news cycle is continual repetition over and over again.”

His statement recalled something I read while paging through The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning, a simple and fun logic book for children written by Hans and Nathaniel Bluedorn. In their section on propaganda, the authors define repetition as “repeating a message loudly and very often in the hope that we will believe it.”

They go on to say that:

“Repetition is also being used when we are bombarded constantly with someone’s viewpoint. The person thinks that if he tells his viewpoint often, then people will believe it.”

Read the rest of the article here.

We suggest starting your logic journey with The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning (for ages 12 and up).