Remembering Edwin Black

Our doctoral advisers teach us what it means to be scholars, teachers, and colleagues. Edwin Black\u27s expectations of a critic were implied in the first graduate courses he offered at the University of Wisconsin: critics wrote illuminating criticism because their sensibilities not their methods permitted them to mine nonobvious insight from stubborn texts. At the same time, Black did not believe that most should aspire to be rhetorical critics. He said as much in his dissertation-turned-book: Except in the hands of a very, very few men, the critical methodology that minimizes the personal responses, peculiar tastes, and singularities of the critic will be superior to the one that does not. In this regard, neo-Aristotelian criticism has undeniable value. Since he provisionally and later patently rejected the notion that there was a method to rhetorical criticism, I focused on trying to figure out how to get into the category of very, very few men without a gender change and on determining how, absent the comfort of a method, one could acquire the sensibilities of a critic

Justifying the War in Iraq: What the Bush Administration\u27s Uses of Evidence Reveal

This essay argues that, if carefully read, the public statements of the Bush administration in the run-up to the March 2003 U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq reveal that the available evidence did not warrant the administration’s confident claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction(WMD). To support this argument, the essay explores the administration’s verbal leakage and Freudian slips, shifts in the burden of proof, strategies that minimized evidentiary accountability, assertions of the presence of convincing evidence that could not be publicly revealed, and tacit concessions that the case for WMD was a patchwork

Discourse and the Democratic Ideal

The most characteristic function of a man of practical wisdom is to deliberate well wrote the author of the rhetoric text that anchors Western discussion of public discourse. In the society envisioned by Aristotle, the end of rhetoric was judgment (krinate)

un-Spun: Finding Facts in a World of {disinformation}

Total lecture time: 1:22:26 Introduction: H. Carton Rogers, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries (00:24-05:58; Lecture: Kathleen Hall Jamieson (06:04-54:02); Questions and answers (54:03-1:22:25). To download a podcast of the lecture, choose one of the additional files below. To view the event announcement, select the Download button at upper right

Messages, Micro-Targeting, and New Media Technologies

This article argues that new media technologies are likely to elicit changes in the content, tone, and potential electoral impact of those campaign messages micro-targeted through them, with a resulting increase in the level of unaccountable, deceptive, pseudonymous campaigning. Access to data-mined information will increase the likelihood that the candidate with the larger warchest will gain an advantage by changing the composition of the electorate. In a world of micro-targeted messaging, reporters have greater difficulty holding sponsors accountable and policing deception