Appeals to fear and appeals to pity are two types of argumentation widely used in the media in political debates and advertising by advocacy groups, public relations firms, governments, and corporations. Johnson (2000, p. 269) has emphasized that mass media rhetoric, to be effective, needs to take the human emotions, in particular, fear and pity, into account. Both types of rhetorical argumentation can have a tremendous emotional impact on a mass audience, when presented in the right way. Mass media argumentation as a persuasive effort involves strategic maneuvering based on advocacy, audience adaption, and presentational devices, which are used to resolve a difference of opinion in one's own favor (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 1999b, 2000, 2001, 2002). On the other hand, both kinds of arguments are so well known to be subject to exploitation and manipulation that they have been traditionally classified in logic as fallacious. Recently, it has come to be recognized, however, that the traditional blanket condemnation is not warranted (Walton 1994). Appeals to emotion should be generally recognized as having legitimate standing as being, under the right conditions, reasonable arguments carrying some weight in shifting a burden of proof in a balance of considerations case where exact calculation of the outcome is not a practical possibility. But if appeals to fear and pity are sometimes rational arguments, how can we strike the right balance between recognizing their rhetorical power and the logical defects they admittedly have in some instances?