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

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)

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

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

Are There Lessons for the Future of News From the 2008 Presidential Campaign?

When news does its job, attentive citizens are better able to understand both the challenges facing the country and the competing visions of those seeking to lead it. Indeed, some argue that “the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” In years past, those studying media have reliably found that consumers of traditional news were better informed about issues of national concern. However, the growth of a new media culture in which partisans are able to envelop themselves in like-minded content raises a question: in the world of ideologically tinged cable news, opinion- talk radio, and viral email, does news in any of its various incarnations still sift fact from fabrication and, in the process, heighten a voter’s knowledge about those aspiring to lead