CAT Critical Reasoning Practice question with Solution 65

QUESTION
The public is aware of the possibility of biases in the mass media and distrusts the media as too powerful. The body of information against which the public evaluates the plausibility of each new media report comes, however, from what the public has heard of through the mass media.

If the view above is correct, it provides a reason for accepting which one of the following conclusions?

OPTIONS
[A]. If there is a pervasive bias in the presentation of news by the mass media, it would be hard for the public to discern that bias.
[B]. The mass media tailor their reports to conform to a specific political agenda.
[C]. The biases that news media impose on reporting tend not to be conscious distortions but rather part of a sense they share about what is interesting and believable.
[D]. News reporters and their public hold largely the same views about what is most important in society, because news reporters come out of that society.
[E]. When a news event occurs that contradicts a stereotype formerly incorporated into reporting by the mass media, the public is predisposed to believe reports of the event.

Answer: A
Explanation:

If the public distrusts the media, believing that it might be prejudiced, but they use information dispersed by the media as fuel for that doubt, then it seems probable that the public would find it difficult to detect a wide-spread media bias. In other words, it would be difficult to find an objective standard against which to judge a media report. (A) is a rephrasing of that thinking.

(B) The public may believe that the media is biased, and the media may indeed be biased, but there's no evidence in the stimulus that there is a specific political agenda at work.

(C) The author hasn’t even established that biases actually exist, just that the public may have trouble discerning media bias, if it even exists. The reasons for the bias therefore cannot be a conclusion the author’s moving towards.

(D) We’re only interested in the bias of the media and the fact that the public would have a hard time seeing it. Whether or not reporters hold the same view as their public is immaterial. There’s also a scope shift here: The “views” discussed in (D) don’t necessarily fall under the category of “biases,” which is after all what the stimulus talks about.

(E) We're given no clues as to how the public would respond to a scenario like this.

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CAT Critical Reasoning Practice question with Solution 65

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