Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante

This is the first of my analyses of the texts of the interviews for The Echo Chamber project. As such, it will be a bit more sketchy than those to follow because each analysis will build on previous ones. My job is to look for the threads of the thought that create a web of knowledge across all the interviews. No web exists in fact. I will be creating it based on my application of disciplinary knowledge (rhetoric) to the texts. Because this is an open-source project, anyone may analyze the interviews for themselves and create their own webs. Together we will create meaning.

I identified 5 themes. The commonality among these themes is persuasion–political and journalistic. Further, each theme deals with epistemological concerns, i.e. how the political and journalistic actors know what they know, who may know it, who may speak, how they may speak, who may be heard, and how this collective knowledge may be evaluated and disseminated. Nothing in this first interview challenges the standard metaphor of journalism as lecture. The epistemology here fits the culture’s noetic field and standard journalistic practice:

1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East.

EXAMPLE: “And what brought it back to the fore in the debate about the war in Congress was the widespread belief, promoted by the government, that we were subject to attack again.”

2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored.

EXAMPLE: “Reviewing some scripts from that period, I noticed that in mid-March we still had the Democrat leader of the Senate, Senator Daschle, complaining about the rush to war without the completion of arms inspections. And he was certainly not the only voice, so Congress wasn’t silent. That’s first thing. Nor were media — Congress wasn’t silent, nor were critics of the idea of war who were also heard in the media. Perhaps not to the degree that government’s message was heard, but they were heard nonetheless.”

3. 3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors.

EXAMPLE: “Members of Congress, particularly members of the House, are extraordinarily sensitive to public opinion because they run every two years. Therefore even many of those who had personal concerns or reservations about the war were listening to their constituents, and very concerned about how they would feel. And didn’t feel that the constituent concern that they heard outweighed what they considered the inadequacy of the argument. That was the situation in Congress.”

4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed.

EXAMPLE: “The argument focused on the weapons of mass destruction. The argument was also heavily influenced by the notion that Iraq might somehow have been connected to, if not to 9/11 at least to the shadowy terrorist network which promoted jihad and 9/11.”

5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political actors.

EXAMPLE: “You point out what one side says. Then you point out what a fact may be. What others have to say about this. And you demonstrate for the benefit of the audience, we hope, that there is more than one way to see this issue. It’s true that the viewpoint of the administration probably receives most of the coverage, but not all. And there are many ways to do it. You do it by presenting the viewpoint of an opposing idea, and I — There are many ways to do it. You do it by presenting an opposing idea in an interview within the piece. You do it by pointing out in the on-camera close of the piece that it conflicts with some previous fact or some likely outcome. But you do do it.”

[Note: Shortly, I will post .jpg files of my analyses. I annotate the texts by color coding the 5 themes. This system will evolve as I progress through the interviews.]

Journalists create master narratives (or accept master narratives created by sources), i.e. a set of characters with motivations interacting and conflicting with other characters in the course of a well-defined plot. Journalists, like all humans, apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events in order to create a coherent and causal sense of events. While this is normal human behavior, a problem arises in journalistic practice–a problem that affects our experience of events as portrayed by journalism–because master narratives, once set, are rarely challenged or changed.

Narrative is a powerful rhetorical tool (for politicians and journalists) precisely because it creates a sense of inevitability in the sweep of its movement from conflict to climax to resolution.

Question: What commonalities and differences exist between the administrations’s narrative and the press’ narrative?

We can see in the Plante interview the power of master narrative. Plante believes the conflict with Iraq was inevitable. From where does this inevitability arise? Did Plante et. al. create it? Did the Bush administration create it? Some combination of the two? Notice that Plante, throughout the interview, clearly portrays inevitability arising from the Bush administration:

“But it was clear, from at least the beginning of 2003, if not sooner, that the Bush administration was determined to go to war, and was basically going through the motions of trying to get the United Nations to agree. In the end, the United Nations agreed to inspections, but not to war, and the war began in any case.”

And that master narrative is difficult to challenge:

“It’s true that the viewpoint of the administration probably receives most of the coverage, but not all.”

ECP: So if we do look back on this time period and look at the argument of the Bush administration where they were saying, ‘They must disarm, otherwise we’re going to war.’ And if we look and see there’s no weapons of mass destruction, that seems to be to be basing a huge decision on an assumption that may or may not be true. Is it the role of the media to question that assumption?

PLANTE: First of all, the assumption was that they did have weapons of mass destruction, and I don’t think any reasonable person would suggest that they didn’t believe that. Colin Powell put his reputation on the line at the United Nations. It now turns out that they, as we know now, received a lot of very bad intelligence. Intelligence that wasn’t really checked or well-sourced. But even with that, there were questions raised at the time about whether it was necessary to go to war, and whether in fact, the weapons of mass destruction that he had were easily, if he had them, were easily deliverable.

From here, I’ll be looking to see how these 5 themes and the master narrative play across other interviews. And I’ll be looking for other themes and narratives. I do not suppose that the Plante interview represents a benchmark of journalistic experience. I think we can see evidence from Plante’s interview that a master narrative existed in which war with Iraq (the climax of the central conflict) became inevitable. Therefore, the press may have had a more difficult time dealing with domestic and allied antagonists. The narrative sweep of events–the applied structure that made these events make sense–may have argued against a more vigorous examination by the press.

The Echo Chamber project considers the role of the major networks. Television is a visual and emotional medium that makes it easy to structure narratives and difficult to examine or change them.