The Rhetoric of News: Is Persuasion Too Much?
Nathaniel Evans
Western Carolina University
Abstract
Of all the many things that are causing uproar among the American people, the reporting of news is certainly one of the most controversial topics. No matter which side of the political, ideological, or identity spectrum a person resides on, they have problems with the way the news is presented. The central identity that must be questioned in all of this is journalism: what are the goals of a journalist? What are the goals of the people to whom the information will be presented? What are the goals of the company the journalist works for? All these things weigh heavily on society, in particular when related to the political and warlike climate of today’s America, and the world at large. Which of the above questions should weigh heaviest on the journalist who is responsible for writing the way information will be disseminated to the American public? In essence, we must ask: how much rhetoric in the field of journalism is too much? What should the goal of a journalist be? In this presentation, I seek to provide an answer to this question: Is persuasion in journalism too much? In this, other categories of journalism will be challenged, such as whether journalists should be tied to certain political parties or identity movements. The writing style can also be challenged, as it, in part, has allowed leeway to the writer for opinionated articles. And, finally, how the American people have shaped this journalistic identity, and how it can be changed.
Introduction
Did you know that 45% of statistics are made up on the spot? No? That’s because they’re not, even though that one was. The underlying meaning for that statement is simple: it’s hard to know when people are telling you the truth. What becomes harder still is determining whether the truth is statistically true; were research findings, surveys, and figures qualified, quantified, and compiled properly? You could always do your own research to discover if someone is credible enough to deliver the truth accurately; the Internet is out there and waiting for you to peruse the millions of pages filled with countless words of information, but that also comes with a problem. Even though the Internet has become much better at regulating its mass of users and who can post, and it is usually easy to find somewhat credible information, it doesn’t hold the same rules as traditional information sources. But, what happens when traditional information sources, those people have trusted for years to disseminate accurate information, fall prey to the lure of easy, quick, and persuasive Internet information that may not be entirely accurate? That is a reality that is all too real in today’s media climate, which is why we must evaluate the role of journalism to determine its identity. Journalists should adhere to the ideals which their audience expects from them: they should tell the truth, and nothing above and beyond that. Though the definition of truth is sometimes confusing, I will define that later.
Current Situation
What faces journalism today is an avalanche of skepticism as America works its way into a frenzy of the misleading ways of major social media. Take, for example, this headline from The Washington Post, which reads: “U.S.-led coalition accidentally bombs Syrian allies, killing 18” (Gibbons-Neff, & Ryan, 2017). While a horrible headline, and notably factually accurate, it is entirely misleading; it seeks to portray the U.S. Military as inadequate, ineffective, and quite simply, daft because they bombed their allies, but that’s not what happened. What did happen was that our allies, The Syrian Democratic Force, mistakenly gave their own coordinates to the U.S. Military to target for a bombing run. Then, a separate unit noticed the first from afar and reported the group as Islamic State fighters. The military, trusting this information, bombed the target given to them (Gibbons-Neff, & Ryan, 2017). Of course, the average reader won’t even realize this. According to a study by the Media Insight Project as a part of the American Press Institute, 60% of people who read the news do not read past the headline (How Americans get their news, 2014). So, then the obvious assumption is that at least 40% of news readers will know that we didn’t just accidentally bomb our allies out of our own incompetence, right? Wrong! According to data analyst for webpage viewing, Chartbeat, 38% of webpage viewers don’t even engage with the page they click on. That means that, out of a group of 100 people who read the headline above, 40 will open the article, and of that 40, only 25 will do so much as move the mouse on the page without closing the tab. What’s worse is that of those 25 who remain, 10%, around three people, will not scroll down. Figure 1 below shows what the article from The Washington Post looks like if a viewer does not scroll down.
Figure 1: The Washington Post's article as viewed without scrolling down on a MacBook Air, 2013 edition in Google Chrome.
The numbers get slightly better on from there. Of the 22 people remaining in our scenario, 60% will make it to the halfway mark (Manjoo, 2013). In this particular article, that is 13 readers who make it 14 paragraphs in, just enough to get the proper information about the misreporting of coordinates to the U.S. Military, which is located in paragraph 10.
It might be that this could be called negligible, were it not for the fact that 69% of Americans get their news via the Internet (How Americans get their news, 2014). The distribution of users who report receiving news from different sources can be located in Figure 2. So, what are the results of these actions? Americans don’t trust news sources. According to the May 2017 Harvard-Harris Poll, published by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, 65% of voters believe mainstream media publishes “Fake News.” That number is higher per certain political parties, but in general, journalism is no longer seen as trustworthy.
Figure 2: American Press Institute found that a majority of the population receives news from the Internet.
Part of the problem stems from the political divide; as news becomes more heavily opinionated, it becomes more difficult to distinguish fact from opinion: News has become too interpretive, and it’s mostly unwanted. A study by the PEW Research Center before election day in 2016 found that 59% of Americans want straight fact from the news with no interpretation of the information whatsoever. But does that mean that rhetoric should be totally dissolved from the field of journalism?
What is Journalism?
Not necessarily. To understand this properly, we have to go back to the broadest sense of what journalism is and narrow it back down, defining each branch as it comes along. Journalism starts as a form of communication, which is taking information and moving it between people to create understanding. Journalists are technical communicators. They take facts and deliver them in a written form to an audience so that the facts can be understood. But, as technical communicators, their role becomes doubly complicated because the English language is not a scientific language. The language comes with denotations and connotations that change over time and vary by region, tone, sentence structure, and context. In other words, it is impossible to present wholesale facts unless you use only numbers, which eliminates the need for journalists entirely. No, instead they must be rhetorical. They must seek to persuade, but they must not persuade their audience of the implications of data. Instead, they must impress upon their audience the importance of the information they are writing about. Russell Rutter (2012) wrote on the necessity of rhetoric in the writing field: “writing must be conceptualized as an activity that by its selection and organization of information and its assessment of audience creates its own version of reality and then strives to win the consensus of its readers that this version is valid" (28). A writer’s, and thus a journalist’s job is to convince their audience that the information they are writing about is important enough to be viewed as impactful and that it is true enough to be reality. The importance here is that the truth cannot be sacrificed for this. The father of modern broadcast journalism as we know it, Edward Murrow, said “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.” It’s important to be truthful first, so that we can persuade people that our words are important. Once we have the facts down, we can almost start writing about them.
Audience and its Importance
After the facts have been gathered, it is important to focus on how to convey them to an audience, and so, a journalist must know what the audience wants. Kirk Amant (2012) wrote about the importance of credibility in international communication, but his ideal applies everywhere: “effective international communication involves developing materials members of other cultures will consider credible, or worth using. Creating such credibility is often a matter of rhetoric, or knowing how to present information in a way that different cultural audiences will consider credible” (474). To apply this to journalism, a journalist must know what his/her audience wants in order to be credible.
The Truth
So, to adhere to Edward Murrow’s belief of journalism, a journalist must be truthful, but what is the truth? The average dictionary gives something along the lines of “that which is in accordance with fact or reality.” But, often truth does not seem objective, especially when someone brings up “subjective truth.” But are there inherent truths that must be accepted by all, no matter what the self believes to be true?
There are two general camps to this argument that has been around for as long as writing. Adherents to the “consensus” school argue that humans create all existing truth through rhetoric; the truth that they know is built upon the persuasion and agreement of many. To those in the “consensus” school, a wall does not exist because it is there physically, but you “know” it exists because you can assume the existence of an objective entity such as a “wall.” The “objectivist” school, however, argues with common sense that because walls exist and constrain daily interactions, language has developed a word to describe this existence and thus rhetoric is affected by it (Railsback, 1983, pp. 352-353). I think it is clear that the latter is the case, specifically because of how languages evolve over time.
In this example, I will use Japanese. The Japanese people were a very private society, and thus were unaware of many new things that their language was incapable of describing. In fact, they have an entire alphabet dedicated to understanding words that come from different languages: Katakana. In large part, this shows that the “consensus” school of thought is inaccurate because of things like pizza. Pizza existed before the Japanese saw it; the earliest recordings of pizza have dated back to circa 70 B.C., whereas pizza as we know it was recorded as early as 1889. The first place in Japan to be certified to sell pizza was in 1997 (Pizza the way they make it in Naples – more or less, retrieved November 13, 2017). Certainly, pizza existed before then, but until it was introduced to Japan, there was no word for it in Japanese. Now there is. They did not know it existed because they had a word for it. They could see it existed before, and then they created a word for it in Katakana: ピザ.
Therefore, truth can be defined as something visible which affects the way of life and constrains it or expands upon it, which leaves rhetoric and language to be defined as ways to convince an audience of the truth. To hearken back to Edward Murrow, journalists must take the objective truth and explain it through language accurately enough to be credible, so that the information conveyed becomes believable.
Conclusion
So, no, persuasion in journalism and rhetoric in news is not too much; it is exactly what is necessary for information to be conveyed in a fulfilling manner to the audience, if it is done correctly. Journalists must adhere to the audience, though the audience itself has somewhat contributed to the plight that faces American news today. Sally Lehrman (2017) expressed that journalism is an engine of Democracy, that is, it was created by Democracy for the sole purpose of being a news source that wasn’t the government, and by and large, she had the right idea. Journalism is supposedly separate from the government so that it does not fall prey to the likes of “subjective truth;” thus, Americans have perpetuated the idea for the longest time that the media always tells the objective truth, even though such things have somewhat faded away now that principle-free enterprises undermine the role of accurate journalism.
Journalism, then, must enhance itself as the distributor of objective, true reality to its audience so that journalists can again become truthful, credible, and believable. They should tell the truth, and nothing more, which is precisely why rhetoric is necessary in news, because it is required to tell the truth.