Hijacked Identities Within the Rhetorical Situation

Is the rhetorical situation reliant on the authenticity of the rhetor? What if the rhetor is a total fake? How can Grant-davie or even Bitzer himself account for that? Would it change anything?

I chose an article that we were assigned in Stephen McElroy’s WEPO class to essentially re-hijack a website. It’s an article written by a man who made a website for the purpose of impersonating Bill Keller, a prominent editorial and Op-ed contributor for the New York Times. Bill Keller’s original blog where he posts his own Op-eds is http://keller.blogs.nytimes.com/. The fabricated website was http://opinion-nytimes.com. The man who wrote the article posted it on the New York Times forums in reference and spread it as well as he could. People actually believed that the article was by Bill Keller himself. Attached is an html file of the original, fabricated article as we were to hijack ourselves and replace with our own Op-eds.

“As those of you who have followed my turbulent relationship with WikiLeaks and its Guru-In-Chief Julian Assange know, I am first in line when it comes to distancing myself from his brand of transparency without government checks and balances.” As you can see here in the scribd document below, it reads like a blog post. It addresses it’s audience in a sort of nuanced rhetorical situation where the rhetor is not genuine. How does that fact being known or unknown affect the rhetorical situation? First of all, the constraints remain virtually the same, although there is one difference: the rhetor does not need to filter what he or she says for propriety. Considering that they themselves are not going to face the consequences (at least not if they don't get caught), they can say whatever they want to the audience in anyway. But, of course, that might give them away if they did. Bill Keller had a characteristic style, so I think it's safe to assume that the new rhetor would adhear to that. The audience (at least for the most part) will be the same if the hijacker is successful in reaching them. Without this part, the impersonator has essentially failed. What about the exigence? Well, that just depends on the rhetor in this case. The hijacked article is about Julain Assange, founder of wikileaks. Considering that Assange is currently in asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy (read about it here), the rhetor obviously felt called to action to criticize Bill Keller's relationship with Assange in Keller's own words! Well, it looks like the imposter-rhetor functions about the same. He managed to reach so many people partly using blogs as a social action if you will. The new blog culture enabled a simple man to impersonate a more famous man and in doing so, spread his message about Julian Assange far and wide.  "American Culture became obsessed with both making celebrities into regular people...and making regular people into celebrities..." Miller and Shepard (4). This simple man had the opportunity to actually become a celebrity. What a twist! Imagine if you were able to impersonate Bill Clinton successfully, or Obama for that matter. Today it's technically possible with blogs.

Human interest, science and the media

In Killingsworth and Palmer's article "Transformations of Scientific Discourse in New Media," they say purveyors of the media and news reporters commitment to epistemology (and to the truth really) is ostensible (133). They are concerned with creating a story for the purpose of engaging their audiences. This is how they spark human interest, which is apparently the most lucrative (let's be real, corporations only care about making money, so this is what works) way to offer their services.

Scientific news is dictated to the public according to it's information value. It being new and unknown is one part of that, and it also must spark human interest, such as the ever-controversial global warming issue. Magazines in the unusually hot summer of 1988 published articles about global warming because of it's relevance at the time(140). They addressed something that people were curious about. There was a demand for a service--a branch within the market if you will. The point is, human interest dictates all reporting and the presentation of all media. The mass media report whatever will be viewed or read, therefore they simple can't report dry, boring things within the world of science that don't ignite human interest. They are forced to report "the popular image of science" (141). "Reporters in Science magazine routinely ignore the general public's taste for dramatic constructions..." (145), while Time magazine is one of the most widely circulated and chooses to acknowledge the pulic's "taste for dramatic constructions"

 In Fahnestock and Secor's article, “The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument,” they say the lower stases, fact, definition, and cause are practiced most in the scientific world while value and action, higher stases make up most the primary approaches to literary discourse (430). Basically, the old rhetorical method of analysis through stases is still useful. Scientific discourse in the news media must strike a balance between using lower and higher stases--the lower out of necessity of the nature of the content, and higher out of the exigence in consideration of the intended audience, which are in this case, vastly laymen. Typically, the media compromises and reports science news using the higher stases in some way in an effort toward consistency and to retain human interest in their overall broadcast or publication.

 Mass media journalists depend a lot on interviews and second sources of information, or just wherever they can get the fullest or most interesting telling of the events, whereas scientific writing is (or is at least meant to be--even if it's being reported on television)(Killingsworth, Palmer 133). This distinction alone seems to challenge the validity of mass journalism on a fundamental level. The question I have to pose about this is: shouldn't news corporations offer the sources of their information more readily? What effect would that have on the business aspect of the reporting world as suddenly the quality of each of the providers of the news were suddenly brought into question? I think a validated, trusted few networks whom people may begin to depend on (although I'm sure the rest would scramble to salvage their reputations) would rise to or retain prominence. I suppose falsifying sources would become more commonplace. One prime example of news reporting failure was Fox News' declaration of George W. Bush winning the popular vote prematurely. It was later revealed that Al Gore indeed won the popular vote. How could they have proven their claim? Shouldn't that be the norm? Of course it should. Is all of this plausible? With increasingly capable and interactive forms of media, I hope to see the day where everything stated as a fact may be traced to it's source by the viewer.

Assignment #1

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Welcome to my blog for Dr Graban's AWE (Advanced Editing and Writing) class at FSU. Please check back periodically to so my work.