LSAT Question Explanation
PT 108, Section 3, Question 1
Necessary AssumptionArgument structure
It is imperative that a trained editor look over journalist's work to make the work as objective as possible.
Journalists have biases that will inevitably enter their work.
Explanation
The flaw here is just that we're missing a lot of key information needed for the conclusion, there is a big leap from saying that reporters have biases to concluding that it's imperative to have editors check the reporters work. The author makes multiple assumptions.
Based on the evidence we don't know that it's imperative to have trained editors review the work, what if the journalists themselves can review their work and catch biases, or someone untrained can do it?
We also don't even know based on the evidence that objectivity is something journalists always need to strive for.
The author also assumes that editors are good at/able to detect and remove biases. What if the editor's job is just to fix grammatical and spelling errors? Then this conclusion wouldn't make sense.
Answer choices
This needs to be true for the conclusion to hold, because if journalists could just eliminate their own biases then we wouldn't need the editors.
This is a necessary assumption because if it's not imperative to strive for objectivity then it wouldn't be imperative to have the editors checking for objectivity.
This is needed for the conclusion that editors are imperative for objectivity. If this assumption weren't true, and the biases didn't take away from objectivity, then it wouldn't be proven that editors are needed to ensure objectivity.
It definitely needs to be true that editors can detect the biases if we're concluding that we need editors to check the work.
It doesn't matter if some reporting is not taken seriously be editors. We're concluding that the editors are needed to eliminate biases and promote objectivity, whether they take all work seriously wouldn't affect if they're imperative for making the work objective.